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Look, its a big city built under sea-level yet right by the ocean. Add one giant hurricane and voila`, a combination that will wreck anyone and everyone's weekend.
Maybe only the Japanese would have had the foresight and discipline to prepare an evacuation plan suitable for the task. Everyone just calm the fuck down, grab a trash bag, and start picking up.

Yeah, that's what I thought to begin with also. There's no way you can get everybody out of New Orleans, some people are going to die. There is no way you could get everybody out. But, if you read about what happened in the convention center because FEMA was two days late getting there. Women being gang-raped, and people getting robbed. Thugs literally having guns and shooting people. It wouldn't have been any more expensive, and probably less so to have begun the rescue effort at a much higher pace before the hurricane hit. Then, you don't save everybody, but a few hundred less people do die. And, the gang-raped women of the convention center don't have to go through the trauma.

If you had listened to the article you would have heard the guy talk about how FEMA itself was better prepared to deal with disasters like that in years past, before experienced FEMA personnel were replaced with political appointees. So, the only foresight would have been that disaster relief is an area where we need experienced people. I bet everybody working for FEMA in the old days could have told you that.

As for the buildings, yeah, to save those you have to start twenty years ago building a better flood control system in New Orleans. It would have been a lot more expensive, and people thought a hurricane like that would never happen anyway. The rebuilding of the city itself would probably be as expensive even if they had started the rescue effort earlier.

The Dutch had their version of Katrina where about 1500 people died I wanna say in the 1950's. That's why they built their elaborate flood control system. In response to that storm. The New Orleans system was built to withstand a storm they figured would happen once every 250 years. The Dutch system is built to withstand a storm that would happen once every 10,000 years.