HARD TIMES UPDATE

Mark Shlepstein, the environmental reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, indicates that the city's disaster planners knew well ahead of time that the city's evacuation plan made no provision for evacuating anyone who could not provide their own private transportation. In a disaster planning exercise earlier this year (called "Hurricane Pam"), they estimated the number of people in this situation as 112,000 households. (For more information, see http://www.thebirminghamtimes.com/News/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=4744&sID=3) Which is to say, the city wrote those people off long before the storm was a twinkle in Gaia's eye. The fact that the city fathers are now "shocked, shocked" that there is looting and crime in the streets at the hands of those who could not get out suggests strongly that they had not expected the unevacuated to survive at all. The only reason I do not consider the looters exonerated by that fact is that they probably never knew it.