Okay, a couple of things. I just watched the video where Nagin calls for mandatory evacuation (It's at CNN). Not only does he state that both he and the Governor have declared states of emergencies, he states that everyone needs to leave and asks churches, etc. to help. he also states that city buses will transport people from 10 specific points in town to refuges of last resort, such as the Superdome, if they could not leave.
He WAS using buses to move people. So why not evacuate from the city? It turns out that there had been a major evacuation from NO with Hurricane Georges. Read about it hear:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/wetlands/hurricane3.html
The money quotes:
And that taught everybody a troubling lesson. Joe Suhayda, the scientist with the big stick, drives me through the city to explain.
"Well, Hurricane Georges was one for which the track had the potential of flooding the city. So the people were given a mandatory order to evacuate the city," says Suhayda.
And government officials had made elaborate plans so the population could evacuate smoothly. We keep passing blue street signs marked Hurricane Evacuation Route. The government had organized fleets of busses, to rescue tens-of-thousands of people who didn't have cars. At the last minute, Hurricane Georges faded to a weaker storm and it veered away, which was lucky. Because the evacuation was a fiasco.
"And what happened to the people that did evacuate is that they got into massive traffic jams and many of them spent the worst part of the hurricane either on the highway[~]stopped[~] or had pulled off to the side of the road," remembers Suhayda.
Now supposing the hurricane had really walloped New Orleans? Here are all of these thousands and thousands of people in their cars trapped on the side of the road. What would happen to them?
"Many of our evacuation routes are subject to flooding," says Suhayda. "And they would be washed away, and there would be really no way for help[~]that is the emergency services people[~]to get to them to help them."
They had tried using fleets of buses before to move people and it had actually had things worse. What would we be saying today if he had sent busloads out over the I-10 bridge going east when it collapsed and drowned them? Given the info they had, they may actually have made pretty reasonable decisions. Seeing the catastrophe evacuation had been before, who would not be leery to try it again, especially if you had no car.
