Originally published January 9 2006
GOP Congressional leaders go after Louisiana's officials for not quickly calling for mandatory evacuation
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Representative Christopher Shays, a republican representative of Connecticut, and other top republicans, accused Louisiana's governor and the Mayor of New Orleans for failing to quickly establish a mandatory evacuation that might have saved many who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana, who had come to Capitol Hill yesterday to plead for more federal hurricane aid, faced Republican accusations that they had endangered lives by failing to force residents to evacuate days before the landfall of Hurricane Katrina.
The intense daylong hearing of a select House investigative committee marked an escalation of the politically-charged battle over who was responsible for the deaths of more than 1,100 Louisiana residents after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, trapping thousands of people in homes, apartments, and hospitals when walls of water crashed through New Orleans' levee system.
A mass voluntary evacuation was launched two days before the hurricane struck, but local officials did not make it mandatory until 19 hours before landfall.
And by the time they did, many of the bus drivers who might be used in rescue efforts had already left the city, according to Representative Malcolm Melancon, Democrat of Louisiana.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco called her state's evacuation ''the one thing we did masterfully," noting that more than 90 percent of residents along the affected Gulf Coast were able to flee.
''Only 100,000 people out of 1.3 million were left in the region," she said.
Likewise, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called it ''one of the most successful mass evacuations in the history of the United States."
Even after the scope and direction of the storm was clear on Saturday, Aug. 27, Rogers noted, ''There was no mandatory evacuation ordered for the carless or those in hospitals or nursing homes not able to leave on their own."
While it was Nagin's job to declare a mandatory evacuation, Blanco had the authority to overrule the mayor and impose one herself.
After waters surged through the city's levee systems, television cameras captured images of poor, sick, and disabled residents -- most of them African-American -- trapped in buildings and on bypasses.
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