Word: mayorally
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...plan. A week after the storm, Nagin summarized it for the Wall Street Journal: "Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them--that was the plan, man." But in fact, the plan was more substantial. And it makes clear that the mayor was in charge when disaster struck. Nagin, a former executive with Cox Communications who was elected three years ago on the promise that he would purge the city of corruption, was supposed to prepare New Orleans for a hurricane and call for an evacuation. He was supposed to get help...
...date, we have heard much from the mayor about what the feds did not do; he has been less specific about what he did. He did not respond last week to repeated requests from TIME for an interview. But the paper trail shows that the mayor did indeed follow the agreed-upon course of action, more or less. It just wasn't a very good one for a city with so many poor people...
...announced, urging people to evacuate at an afternoon press conference with the Governor less than 48 hours before the storm hit. Still, he didn't make the evacuation mandatory, as at least one nearby parish had done. According to a New Orleans Times-Picayune story written that day, the mayor said he was having his staff research whether he could issue a mandatory evacuation, which he said was unprecedented...
...fact, the city's plan clearly allows the mayor to do just that. But Nagin also hesitated because the city might be held liable for unnecessarily closing hotels and other businesses, according to the article. That was a practical, if coldhearted, calculus in a city like New Orleans. "Any place that has a lot of tourists, it's very expensive to evacuate," says Kate Hale, who was director of emergency management for Dade County, Fla., when Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992. "It costs $1 million a coastal mile to evacuate. You're shutting down businesses. It's not something...
...Saturday before the storm, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, called the mayor personally to emphasize just how serious the threat was. "This was only the second time I called a politician in my life," Mayfield tells TIME. "I wanted to be able to go to sleep knowing I had done everything I could...