Forced evacuations we'd like to see

The phrase is meaninglessness on two levels: According to a television interview Mayor Ray Nagin gave the Saturday night before the storm, he didn't think he had the legal authority to order a mandatory evacuation or the ability to enforce it. City attorneys were scrambling to find out whether he could order everybody out, he said, and if doing so would make him liable for the many thousands of people who had no means of escape. The next morning he issued New Orleans' first-ever order of evacuation. Next door, Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard maintained that despite his desire to do so, he didn't have the legal authority to require his residents to leave.

To Mayor Nagin's credit, he made it clear on that Saturday that everybody needed to get out and that citizens shouldn't wait around to hear the word "mandatory" before deciding to leave. They might never hear it. He urged those who could to check on their neighbors, especially the elderly and infirm, and to use every conveyance possible to escape the wrath of the approaching storm.

The mayor was a voice of calm when others around him were succumbing to hysteria. But when it came time to get pushy, he did that, too. Even so, Mayor Nagin should have had his legal questions answered long before a storm was in the Gulf of Mexico. A mandatory evacuation had never been ordered, but the question of its legality should have been asked and answered years ago. What a mayor can do as a hurricane approaches should have been institutional knowledge, passed like a baton from one administration to the next.

It ought to have been passed down from governor to governor, too. The mayor's powers may have been limited, but as the chief executive of the state, Gov. Kathleen Blanco had more muscle. State law allows her to not only "direct and compel the evacuation of all or part of the population from any stricken or threatened area within the state," but also to utilize "all available resources of the state government and of each political subdivision of the state as reasonably necessary to cope with the disaster or emergency."

The Friday before the storm Gov. Blanco declared a state of emergency, and that could have served as a prerequisite for more forceful action. Imagine every school bus in South Louisiana packed with evacuees and heading to higher ground. Imagine the vans, SUVs and cars owned by state and local agencies being devoted to the same purpose. In retrospect, the mayor should have used his bully pulpit to demand more action from the state. But he ultimately didn't have the authority to take control of all those vehicles. The governor did.

Elected officials assumed that when the big one hit New Orleans, it would catch thousands upon thousands of people still in the city. Some wouldn't be able to afford a way out. Others who could afford to do so wouldn't either. Not a whole lot could have been done for that second group. The fact that even now there are people vowing to stay in their flooded homes is proof that some deaths were inevitable.

Louisiana was never going to be able to handle a disaster of Katrina’s scale without substantial outside help. If the federal response had not been so woefully inadequate, the storm would not have exacted such a horrific toll on New Orleans.

But that doesn't absolve anyone at any level of government from neglecting the poor. The assumption that poor people would be trapped was met with inaction, when it should have been met with a determination to save as many as possible. The words "mandatory evacuation" mean nothing when state and local officials won’t or can’t deploy the resources necessary to make the mandate stick. Not only could the mayor not order an evacuation, and not only could he not enforce it, but there were those who couldn't or wouldn’t leave. The corpses floating in the water attest to that.