Captain Ed takes a detailed look at the New Orleans emergency plan and concludes it was a flawed plan and they failed to follow even the little that they had down. They must be wishing that that web site with the emergency plan had gone down with the hurricane since everyone can now see how inadequate their planning was and then see that they were apparently incapable of following the plans that they had in place. When it became apparent that Katrina was heading into the Gulf, didn't anyone take these plans down, dust them off, and look at how to implement them? Apparently, not.

The plan assumes those resources would be available for use, and yet no one at the state level thought to ask for them until a day after the flood waters submerged them almost to their roofs. No one even thought to move them to higher ground before the storm hit New Orleans so that they could ferry people in and out of the city. Instead, after the levees broke on Tuesday morning, FEMA had to arrange for buses out of Houston to travel over damaged roads to get to the outskirts of New Orleans, which they did on Wednesday evening -- not a bad turnaround time considering the widespread road damage and travel hazards Katrina caused.

However, the plan does discuss, in rather generic and passive terms, how to plan evacuation into the response. The EOP section that deals with evacuation, Part III, states clearly that even a voluntary evacuation should initiate local transportation assets to assist in getting people out who cannot transport themselves.

Read the rest of his analysis. Reporters should start here and be ready the next time they interview any local officials.