Chapter Chapter 4
Section Post-Landfall Evacuations in New Orleans
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Post-Landfall Evacuations in New Orleans
As conditions in New Orleans worsened on August 30, due to the massive flooding, State and local officials began organizing a mass evacuation of the city. Since neither the Louisiana nor the New Orleans evacuation plans addressed evacuation protocols for post-landfall,83 State and local officials worked with FEMA, DOD, and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to conduct the post-landfall evacuation.84
The Superdome presented the most immediate concern to officials. The population at the stadium continued to grow as thousands of people migrated there from their flooded homes.85 The high floodwaters cut off access to the Superdome, which made re-supply, evacuations, and other operations extremely difficult.86 The facility had lost power during the storm, leaving only dim lighting from emergency generators. Louisiana National Guard personnel worked to protect the stadium’s emergency generators from rising floodwaters.87 The Louisiana National Guard later reported that, “The vast majority of the sheltered evacuees were good people who were trapped in a bad situation.88 Conditions at the stadium became increasingly difficult due to the large numbers and the lack of air conditioning or running water. 89 On the morning of August 30, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) assessed the Superdome as “uninhabitable.90
Governor Blanco visited the Superdome on August 30 and concluded the stadium needed to be evacuated “as soon as possible.91 Louisiana State and local officials could not manage a post-landfall evacuation operation of this magnitude without additional support. Shortly thereafter, FEMA personnel at the Superdome requested that FEMA headquarters provide buses to transport evacuees from the stadium. Within an hour of receiving the call, FEMA tasked the Department of Transportation—as coordinator of ESF-1, Transportation—to support the evacuation operations. DOT began assembling a bus fleet of over 1,100 vehicles, equal in size to some of the largest transit agencies in the Nation to evacuate thousands of persons from the Superdome and other parts of New Orleans.
Louisiana and Federal officials began contacting other States to relocate evacuees to their cities.92 They worked together to develop plans to transport the people in the Superdome to out-of-state shelters. By the morning of August 31, Governor Blanco reached an agreement with Texas Governor Rick Perry to evacuate the thousands at the Superdome to the Houston Astrodome.93 Significant numbers of federally-contracted buses began to arrive at the Superdome the evening of August 31.94 Initially, evacuees were loaded onto buses and driven all the way to Houston. As the Houston Astrodome began to fill, however, Federal and State officials identified alternative destinations in multiple States and the District of Columbia.95
Both DOD and DOT worked with State and local officials to deliver food and water as well as develop plans to evacuate people from three other locations in the city: Algiers Point, the Convention Center, and the Interstate-10 (I-10) cloverleaf.96The Governor’s office received reports of the crowds at the Ernest N. Morial Memorial Convention Center and the I-10 cloverleaf on August 31.97 Reports began to arrive that large crowds had gathered at the Convention Center even though city officials had never intended it to be a shelter.98 Without strong public messaging to inform them otherwise, many of these people had simply assumed that the Convention Center—as a large public building on high ground—would be a safe gathering place.99 No food or water was pre-staged there because the facility was neither a shelter nor a designated evacuation point.100
In addition, large numbers of people gathered or were deposited by search and rescue teams—who were conducting boat and helicopter rescue operations with neither a coordinated plan nor a unified command structure—atop raised surfaces, such as the I-10 cloverleaf downtown. People brought to the raised surfaces as they transitioned to safety had little shelter from the sun and were in ninety-eight degree heat.101 Faced with this increasingly dire situation, Governor Blanco used her executive authority to commandeer private school buses as evacuation assets, since many of the city’s buses had been parked in lots that had flooded.102 The Governor directed school buses to ferry the people atop the I-10 cloverleaf to safety outside of the city.103
By the morning of September 2, approximately fifteen thousand people had been evacuated from the Superdome, leaving approximately 5,500 remaining. Reports on exact numbers vary because the Superdome and Convention Center populations swelled after landfall, as additional evacuees continued to arrive while the evacuation was underway. “The last 300 people in the Superdome climbed aboard buses Saturday… Evacuations of the last remaining people at the arena were halted before dawn Saturday as authorities diverted buses to help some 25,000 refugees at the New Orleans Convention Center… The Texas Air National Guard estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people remained at the Superdome early on Saturday…” On Saturday, September 3, a representative of the State “Office of Emergency Preparedness put the figure at 2,000, and said people had recently begun flocking there not for shelter, but to escape New Orleans after they heard buses were arriving.104
Except for the ill or injured, no one was evacuated from the overcrowded Convention Center until Saturday, September 3.105 By that point, however, over 35,000 people had been evacuated from New Orleans, including all the ill or injured at the Superdome.106 As the evacuation progressed, the situation at the Convention Center and the Superdome stabilized, with food, water, and medical supplies available at both locations.107 By September 4, DHS reported that the “Superdome and Convention Center have been evacuated; however, displaced persons continue to migrate to these sites and will be evacuated as required.108
In addition to ground operations, a joint DHS, DOT, and DOD airlift successfully evacuated over 24,000 people, constituting the largest domestic civilian airlift on U.S. soil in history. 109 Federal departments and agencies worked with State, local, and private sector officials to coordinate the operation. After the Federal Aviation Administration restored traffic control and runway operations at New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong International Airport, DOT coordinated with private air carriers and the Department of Defense’s Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to begin the massive airlift. DOT invited the Air Transport Association, the trade organization of principal U.S. airlines, to come to the NRCC to help coordinate with air carriers volunteering their services. In addition to these civilian flights, the Department of Defense simultaneously conducted a major medical airlift from the airport.110 The DHS Transportation Security Administration (TSA) provided screeners and Federal Air Marshals to maintain security. Search and rescue helicopters brought people directly to the airport, while Federal Protective Service personnel escorted busloads of evacuees from the Superdome.111 The TSA and other security personnel confiscated hundreds of weapons from evacuees at the airport, including ninety in the first three days of the airlift.112
Lessons Learned:
The Department of Transportation, in coordination with other appropriate departments of the Executive Branch, must also be prepared to conduct mass evacuation operations when disasters overwhelm or incapacitate State and local governments.
Federal transportation coordinators had little situational awareness regarding the movement of evacuees due to the complete breakdown of the region’s communications infrastructure. Specifically, Federal and State officials often had difficulty coordinating the departures and destinations of the large number of buses, trains, and aircraft involved in the evacuations. In one case, a fully provisioned train with room for six hundred evacuees left the city with fewer than one hundred passengers.113 Buses and flights of evacuees were sometimes diverted, while en route, to new destinations without the knowledge of officials at either the original or new destinations. Without prior notice of the evacuees’ arrival times, States sometimes had difficulty accommodating the enormous influx of people. In addition, some passengers reported that they had not been informed of their destinations when they boarded the evacuating flights and had no idea where they were when their flights landed. Speaking about the evacuees, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee relayed, “They have been treated like boxes, in many cases, warehoused.114
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