No car? Louisiana doesn't care
Apparently the emergency planners for the state of Louisiana could give a rat's ass about poor people who don't have a car:
Other state officials told the committee that the state's pre-hurricane evacuation, which relied on people getting themselves out of danger, worked smoothly.
"Everyone who had desire and means to evacuate did so," said Secretary of Transportation Johnny B. Bradberry.
However, he said, the "plan did not address people without vehicles." Those people were the primary responsibility of local authorities, he said. There was no request for assistance from New Orleans officials, he added.
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csa | 9:06 AM |
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Why should the state give a rat's ass about people without cars? As Bradberry says, it's a local responsibility. Different localities will have wildly different ways to get carless people out. That's why we have local governments.
Put another way, the evacuation of people with cars is largely a flow problem. How do you use the highways to get a zillion people between points A and B. For the most part, the state is responsible for the highways, so it makes sense for the state to deal with that part of the problem. With carless people, the hardest part is arranging transportation. Finding resources and getting them to the people to be transported. Who owns and is most familiar with the resources best able to transport a given set of carless people? Certainly not the state. It becomes a state problem when the busses start heading out. At that point, though, the people being evacuated aren't really different from those with cars.
It just so happens that the local government in this case decided not to follow their own plan, and didn't bother using their own resources to evacuate those without cars.
The state has a responsibility for all its citizens, even the ones without cars. The statement by the secretary of Transportation displays a stunning lack of tact and sensitivity towards what was obviously a huge problem - the evacuation of a large poor population that did not own their own vehicles.
In normal transportation planning, yes the movement of local residents by transit is under the jurisdiction of the local government. But in a disaster situation such as this, for the State Department transportation to basically absolve itself of any responsibility is ridiculous and unconscionable.
It is pretty obvious that there were failures at every level to evacuate people, not just at the state level. Unfortunately, Mr. Bradberry is just one of the many officials who decided to point the finger somewhere else instead of at his own agency first.
