AggieDiver
Contributor
Maybe I should have clarified that I was referring specifically to the way new orleans responded, not the way the whole gulf coast responded, but I stand by what I said about the differences between the two. I work for a company based in Baton Rouge and we were responsible for setting up disaster recovery centers all over Louisiana and Texas after Katrina and Rita. We got to see first hand exactly how people responded to the storm, and I will tell you firsthand from seeing both the New Orleans response to Katrina and the San Miguel response to Wilma, that it was very different. First of all, what we saw in New Orleans was a city that has known for decades that a large storm would be likely to flood a big chunk of the city. Yet the city government had no plan to deal with such a situation, or ignored the plans they had. Thousands upon thousands of residents knew for decades that the city was likely to flood, but made no plans of their own about how to prepare for that situation or used "looting what was left" and "begging for FEMA handouts" as their survival strategy. The actual damage to New Orleans prior to the levee breaches was very minor compared to what coz faced from Wilma. Coz was under the right side eye wall of a cat 4 storm for nearly 48 hours. Katrina was barely cat 2 when it hit N.O. And after it was over, the people in coz put their butts to work cleaning up and the local officials put their plans into action to recover essential services. The folks in N.O. (Even the ones not flooded out) mainly stood around complaining about how the government wasn't there to fix things fast enough. And here in Houston, once they were all settled in free apartments paid for by the government, we got to see them every six months for the next two year begging and screaming that they just hadn't had enough time yet to get back on their feet and paying their own rent. The folks in coz were on their feet working their butts off within hours after the storm finished blowing. Two years later, we still had thousands from N.O. Here in Houston living rent free on government welfare and telling us they needed more time to get back on their feet.
You are correct that not all of the gulf coast responded that way, but more than just a few dozen in New Orleans did. Our company spent months signing them up at the astrodome and other recovery centers around Louisiana and Texas, and I can promise you the number was in the tens of thousands who spent months or years on public assistance despite their home state begging for folks to come home to take the jobs that needed to be filled. The point of what I was saying was that clearly the folks in San Miguel planned for the destruction of the storm and expected to have to do the work of recovery for themselves and they wasted no time getting started. A large number of the folks in New Orleans, including the city government, made little or no preparations, and expected somebody else to take care of them after the storm. That comparison doesn't hold for mobile or Biloxi or anywhere else, but it was very apparent for New Orleans.
And yes GGunn, I know parts of New Orleans were under water...and most of the folks there were aware of that possibility for nearly 2 decades before it happened, yet had no plans to evacuate themselves or to survive staying where they were. They were given explicit warnings from the hurricane center about that possibility just days before the storm, and still many chose to make no effort to leave or prepare for the possibility. Then they had the gall to complain about how long FEMA took to get there and the manner in which they provided aid. Not a shining moment for those folks, and quite different than the response in Cozumel.
