Michael Giesbrecht writes:
> The government (local, State, and Federal) appropriated responsibility
> for the Mississippi River levy system, the drainage systems, the pumping
> systems, the road ways, and the bridges, but apparently, they left it to
> the market to provide the service of evacuating the poor and the infirm.
> Since they poor and infirm were not, to any great extent, evacuated, is
> this an example of market failure?
I'm not sure the premise is entirely correct. About 30% of the
(former?) population of New Orleans is below the federal poverty line,
yet 80-90% of the population was evacuated. Furthermore, not all of
those who failed to evacuate were poor; some were just stubborn people
determined to ride out the storm at home or die trying.
We cannot really come to a judgement about the extent of evacuation's
failure without comparing the percentage who stayed behind to the
percentage who have generally stayed behind in past hurricanes. While
the consequences of this hurricane are more severe than nearly all
hurricanes of the last century, no one knew in advance that this would
be the case.
Also, it seems to be that the failure to evacuate those without their
own transportation was in fact a government failure -- the official
evacuation plan for New Orleans called for people to use their own
vehicles when possible, but for municipal and school busses to be made
available to those without access to other transportation.
Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00
'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal
vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles
and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to
provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation
and require assistance in evacuating'...
Yet, those busses were not used, and there was a picture circulating
of a parking lot filled with something like 250 (flooded, unusable)
school busses.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050901/480/flpc21109012015
Clearly, either everyone in the city government forgot about this part
of the plan, or thought the hurricane wouldn't be so bad and putting
everyone in the Superdome and the Convention Center would be sufficient.
--Robert Book
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
