So, what gives me the right to say this about New Orleans? I was there. I was one of the rescue workers that put my life on hold at home, to help others in a tragedy that I initially met with confusion and grief. Now the grief has subsided, but the confusion is even stronger.

My primary confusion was purely geographic; I simply couldn’t understand how people couldn’t get out of the city in the first place. I grew up in Idaho, a land of sprawling fields and open range. In fact, you can see the ski resort fifty miles away from the east side of my parents’ house. I thought it was like this everywhere. Sure, I have been other places, quite different from Idaho; Minneapolis, San Diego, Las Vegas; but they all are nothing like Louisiana, or the South in general. Louisiana is wooded, green, and wet; wet being key. New Orleans practically floats atop a very thin layer of earth spread across a wet underbelly of Lake Pontchartrain, Mississippi River, or the Gulf of Mexico, depending on where you are. There are canals, and bayous, and lakes everywhere. The ground is always wet. The air is always wet. It isn’t just humid, it is as if you are breathing a slightly drier version of water rather than wet air.

Because of the incredibly wet atmosphere, it takes a lot of work to build a road. Have you ever tried building a road on a foundation that continues to shift as you construct your byway? Think of it like trying to bridge a pool of quicksand with supports not long enough to ever reach anything solid. Hard to do, to say the least. Proof of this is the small number of byways weaving in and out of the city. Basically you have I-10, East and West (remember the pictures of all of the people stranded on them?), and Highway 90 crossing the Mississippi into the western suburbs. There are a few surface roads and highways (River Road to name one) leading out of the city.

Prior to August 29, 2005, there were approximately 485,000, with 1.4 million people living in the metro area. When there are really three roads leading out of the city, and two of them are in directions that you don’t want to take (I-10 East, and Highway 90) that is an enormous number of people to cram onto a two lane road. Eventually contraflow was instituted, and both sides of I-10 were running west, but still, that is too many people.

The thing that really confused me was the fact that people needed to be on a road to escape a disaster. Here, if there isn’t a road, there is at least relatively flat ground that you could drive, walk, crawl, something on, to get out of the way of a coming monstrosity. That is simply not the case in New Orleans.

Once I-310 branches off of 10, the interstate heads directly across Lake Ponchartrain. Bridges. The freeway travels across them for miles. Unbelievable. To get out of the city, you have to cross a giant body of water across a bridge (two when contraflow is enacted), that are narrow and slow on their best days.

Sure, if people had been organized, if someone told them what to do, if they planned ahead, something, a staggered evacualtion could probably have taken place. But this didn’t happen. Why? I am certain that part of the blame should go to the people in charge, those who are supposed to take care of the citizens of the city. The other portion, the larger portion, lies with the citizens themselves. Why didn’t they plan? Why didn’t they act? I know, I know; there were plenty of times in the past when they had evacuated and hadn’t needed to, or they survived Camille, so why shouldn’t they fair well in Katrina? Well, the simple answer is, they just didn’t. Katrina was too big, people weren’t prepared. That is all there is to it.

So this is why people couldn’t get away; pure and simply geography, infrastructure and lack of planning. The city was never designed to accommodate a massive exodus of people in a whole lot of hurry.
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