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November 17, 2005
Evacuation and Protection of the Streetcars
(crossposted on CanalStreetcar and YatPundit)
Since yesterday's article in the NYT, I've been asked two questions numerous times, enough to merit replying here rather than individually.
The first question is, why didn't RTA use more buses to evacuate people from the city?
The answer is simple: that wasn't the plan.
The city's hurricane plan has essentially two stages, voluntary evacuation and mandatory evacuation. When the Mayor calls for a voluntary evacuation, the idea is to encourage those with the ability to leave town and the means to support themselves away from town to get out. This allows municipal services to focus on those without means and ability.
When a mandatory evacuation is ordered, two things happen. First, the police and other volunteers go through the more affluent neighborhoods, announcing the mandatory evacuation. This is usually not very significant, because either people bailed voluntarily or they've decided to ride the storm out. Second, plans kick in to get anyone who can't leave the city to the Superdome, which is the "shelter of last resort." RTA buses and operators were indeed used to get people to Da Dome, per the plan.
There's never been a plan to evacuate those in the "last resort" category, because nobody ever anticipated that there would be NO IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE after the storm! Under normal circumstances, the LA National Guard would be staged just outside the impact area of the storm, and would roll into town right on its heels with water, ice, food, and medical assistance. The debate on who is responsible for the fact that this did not happen still rages, but the bottom line is that the city's plan worked--up to that point.
The second question was why didn't RTA move the streetcars to higher ground? The answer was simple--RTA thought that the car barn at the Randolph SIS facility on Canal Street was indeed high enough and safe enough. It's important to remember that flood planning and protection in New Orleans is based on what has to be done to protect the city from storm surge coming in from Lake Pontchartrain. Levees and floodwalls were built high enough that the surge from a Category-3 to Category-4 storm would be held off, and that a Cat-5 storm would still only push water into the subdivisions close to the lake. The Randolph SIS facility (and Mid-City as a whole) flooded as a result of the breach in the levee/floodwall on the 17th Street Canal and the subsequent failure of the pumps. The storm itself didn't damage the streetcars, a poorly designed levee/floodwall did. Had that floodwall held, Katrina's storm surge would not have reached Mid-City.
Like the issue of the delays in relief, the cause of the canal breach will be debated in public and in courtrooms for a decade. Still, RTA's decision to keep the streetcars where they are was sound, based on what they knew about the storm and the conventional wisdom about our levees.
Posted by YatPundit at November 17, 2005 10:30 AM
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