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Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Again with the placards

Car placards to be used for re-entry in case of mandatory evacuation this hurricane season

As for businesses, (Dep Mayor Jerry) Sneed advised them to "get a placard, or else they're not going to be able to get back in."

Placards are designated for vehicles, not for individual employees, he said, adding that returning workers also should carry with them business and government identification cards. Placards fall into four classifications: Emergency Responders needed to clear streets; Tier 1 for critical government workers and businesses that store hazardous chemicals; Tier 2 for essential retailers such as large grocers; and Tier 3 for smaller retail firms.

City Hall also has a limited number of Tier 1-R placards for companies that have locations in multiple parishes, such as banks and gas stations.
Once again I am at a loss to understand how this sort of thing is tolerated in a free society. Here we have a situation whereby the Mayor, on the pretext of a perceived threat of a storm (a threat we can assume he will almost always exaggerate), can arbitrarily declare martial law, force citizens to pack up and leave their homes, and then make them wait an undetermined amount of time before they are allowed back in. That alone is unacceptable.

Yes, there needs to be a clear and effective system for warning the population of an impending storm and for assisting those who want to evacuate but can't do so on their own. But the freaking Mayor of New Orleans does not get to forcibly remove people and require even the privileged "essential" business owners and operators who are allowed back in to produce papers upon demand of law enforcement. What kind of police state do they think they are running here? Arizona?

Varg likens the tier system to the infamous red light cameras. I think that's pretty good. Neither scheme provides the public safety benefit it sells it self on. Each is a favorite toy of municipal officials looking to flex their muscles and/or impose unnecessary financial demands upon the citizenry. Both are likely to slow vehicular progress on major thoroughfares.

In 2008, our first experiment with tiered reentry was a disaster. Physically and financially exhausted families were made to sit in their vehicles on the side of the highway in the heat of early September
(for days in some cases) by placard-check roadblocks while local officials whined about the importance of the stupid system. A similarly frustrated T-P editor James O'Byrne wrote a widely circulated column about the debacle in which he argued that it would likely discourage people from heeding the next call to evacuate. And he's right. At least in my case he is. 20 plus hours on the road to nowhere and God knows how long on the way back is a far more harrowing and expensive ordeal than 3 to 5 days at home with no power. Unless I am absolutely certain that a BP-spawned Firecane or possibly Geauxjira is moving on New Orleans, I'm not going anywhere.

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