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Originally Posted by Wolfpack
I've done a little research, going back over time at the NHC site with their forecast advisories with Katrina. The first time New Orleans was put essentially into the forecast margin-of-error (that cone you always see on hurricane forecasts) was with the 5 AM EDT advisory on Friday 8/26, roughly 72 hours before landfall. At that point, the official prediction had the storm in the east central Gulf early Monday morning, turning north and heading towards Pensacola. Winds were only 75 MPH at that time. Given this sort of information, it would be highly unlikely that anyone in Louisiana would have considered evacuation given the track and relative weakness of the storm. 12 hours later (60 to landfall), I'm sure they started to think about at least evacuating the coastal areas because the forecast track had moved west and put landfall around Passcagoula mid-afternoon on Monday and Katrina had strengthened to 100 MPH. By 11 PM EDT Friday, the track had shifted west again (in actually this forecast was the first one to be "right" in the end) to a MS/LA border landfall. Katrina was up to 105 MPH, a serious, but not catastrophic threat. Every forecast from that point forward generall had the track right with some minor variations from update to update. So they had 54 hours basically before landfall if they could be certain the track was accurate (not a given considering where it was expected to be just 18 hours before). I don't think they got one iota of how bad it might get until the early morning hours of Sunday when the track was established right over New Orleans and the wind speed jumped from 115 to 145 MPH in just three hours. It was grave enough a possibility that the NHC starting issuing updates to the track every three hours instead of six hours from that point on. At this point, though, landfall was just 30 hours away. By 10 AM CDT Sunday, nine hours after the storm reached 145 MPH, it was up to 175 MPH and under 24 hours were left until landfall. It was at this point that the mayor issued the manditory evacuation. There just wasn't enough time to prep the city.
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I'm in the camp that's thinking there should have been a better command structure in place for such an emergency and some better planning for after the fact but I think the preparation beforehand was about as good as they could muster. All the people bitching about having a 72 hour evacuation plan are really failing to take this into consideration and falling into the hindsight 20/20 trap. It wasn't until half that where it even seemed like a remote possibility. Hell, didn't they just have a 105 mph hurricane there a couple of (last?) years ago and not much happened to the city? Certainly nothing of this magnitude.
Exceptioning the tourists, who were really screwed in this when they shut down the airport ahead of time, everyone who could (and wanted to- not the "I'm going down with the ship" crowd) managed to get out of town. Even with only 24 hours to really evacuate, they managed to get 1 million people out of town and I remember 2am Monday morning when the outermost bands of storms were arriving, one reporter was standing at the bridge in Baton Rouge that comes in from New Orleans and he was commenting on how it was empty and everyone who wanted to get out had. The Superdome and the other "shelters of last resort" seemed to have held up and kept people from dying to the elements in the first 24 hours and while a handful suffered stress-related deaths, everyone else was still alive, even if uncomfortable. It wasn't until the levee broke, flooding a lot more of the city that things went crazily south to where we are now.
SI