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Usually Government (local or national) takes care of this sort of thing. Low taxes (and therefore lower revenues) means there is less money to invest in vital infrastructure. A low tax rate has its benefits but this is an example of its greatest disadvantage.
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The ability to prepare with the available resources that New Orleans possessed even at the lowest level would have saved 140,000 people the terrible heartache and misery they endured this week.
I still feel that New Orleans was the victim first of poor and inadequate planning from the very beginning, with over 140,000 households on welfare or unable to flee from certain destruction, it seems they should have been the first to benefit from an evacuation plan...but sadly....the school buses, well over 300 just lingered.
Pompey, I have personally witnessed several terrible disasters, the Hurricane Camille that our family rode out in Biloxi when I was a wee lad. I have been snowed in for days in Montana with my grandparents, and a large earthquake in California when I was stationed onboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Long Beach... All three times my family and myself benefited from good planning and we didnt panic. But I have know since childhood, that New Orleans would suffer a biblical fate based on its location and the kind of town that it is...and that is not a cultural or racial observation, it is based on historical fact.
The city of New Orleans was destined to be destroyed by a catastrophe of some kind, because of its location, but like all major cities in our United States, it too must be reborn from terrible circumstances and become something better....or it will just die.
I am not surprised you agree with me Pompey for whatever reason I guess, I am just trying to point out the obvious...And besides it is nothing new really, people have been beating that drum for over 60 years now, at least the Army Corps of Engineers have.
I would not like to be the Mayor of New Orleans and face the undeniable truth that I had a chance to act before the storm struck and found myself overwhelmed when it did.
Just on a side note, most major ports on the west and east coast of the U.S. including Hawaii and Alaska benefit from weather and tide data derived from observation, satillites, and instruments tethered to bouys miles from shore, that way we can predict storm surges and speed of low and high pressure events that travel near or towards our respective shorelines. New Orleans lacked the very thing that would have at least informed the city fathers that a storm surge of over 20 feet high was coming long before the first few feet over the levee would have been breached.
All this modern science and data collection ability and it all really comes down to people going from door to door alerting residents and marshalling forces to carry the poor and indigent out of the affected area.
