Exit to the Convention Center

Via Google Earth, this is a picture of the half-mile long Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, where thousands of people waited days for food and water after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. I've highlighted it in red.

This image looks east. The Mississippi River runs a couple hundred feet behind the center. Passing over the Morial is US90, and the Greater New Orleans Bridge. It runs right over the top of the building. There are at least three exit/entrance ramps (colorized) which hit the surface within a few hundred feet of the center. One of them touches down right on the center's doorstep.

The next image (a north-oriented detail from an August 31 satellite photo) shows the section of US90 between the Superdome (upper left) and the convention center (lower right). On the full-sized image, you can see vehicles on the highway near the Superdome, damage done by the hurricane to the roof, and some of the flooding in the streets to the west (left).

If vehicles could get to the Superdome, what was preventing them from getting to the convention center? In fact the bridge (also known as the Crescent City Connection) was the primary route for getting supplies into the Superdome and getting people out, because the levees on the other side of the river weren't breached and less flooding occurred. Low-lying portions of the freeways to the north and west of this picture were flooded. The trucks and buses to the Superdome went right over the the people at the Convention Center.

Getting supplies to the convention center was hardly a matter of driving through miles of waterlogged streets beset by gangs and snipers. All FEMA had to do was take the exit ramp past the blockade of police keeping people from walking across the bridge and drop it off at the front of the building. Or toss it off the bridge.

•  Can't be I-90

  I-90 runs along the northern part of the U.S., west to east from Seattle thru Chicago to Boston.

  Are you talking about I-10 ?

  by RobertInWisconsin on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 11:53:12 AM PDT

  •  Corrected

    I10/US90.

    by darrelplant on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 11:56:16 AM PDT

    •  I'll treat this as your tip jar

      by caseynm on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:39:24 PM PDT

•  recommended.

  Screen shots. Of everything.

  Roads were clear: why the delay?

  Condi, btw, said: "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," ...as she toured damaged parts of her native Alabama.

  So the question is, if not on the basis of race, then on what basis? Why?
  

  by starkravinglunaticradical on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 11:53:36 AM PDT

  •  Then the American people need to relieve

    this shoe-shopping, theatre-going psychopath from her present employment.  The GOP likes zero tolerance?  In this instance I'm right with them.  Anyone who disrupts relief processes with photo ops, lies to the public, shows the slightest degree of incompetence or pathology and/or makes a stupid statement to the media needs to be fired, immediately.

    by GN1927 on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:03:44 PM PDT

•  darrelplant, notice all the vehicles?

  The ones under water? Have you noticed all the school buses under water? All the trucks under water?

  If the city, the state or FEMA had seized all the available vehicles BEFORE the storm hit land, imagine the number of people that could have been saved.

  As an additional bonus the vehicles would have been saved and not part of the enornous clean up after the storm.

  Additionally, the vehicles that did leave saving people could have been loaded up with food, water and medical supplies to return to the city after the storm had passed.

  by 0hio on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 11:53:46 AM PDT

  •  You're right

    FEMA and the Bush administration screwed up big time in the evac plans for the city. Then they screwed up the relief efforts.

    The city really couldn't have done the job by itself. You need people to go door-to-door and evacuate thouands of sick and elderly people. There weren't even enough people to evacuate the hospitals before the storm. So yeah, FEMA should have pumped people into the city to drive buses, carry folks to vehicles, andget people out of the hospitals.

    Of course, they also needed to have a plan on where to evacuate them to. Because you can't just dump people off of buses onto high ground when you're evacuating because of a hurricane.

    by darrelplant on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:06:58 PM PDT

•  I can't believe it has taken you this long

  to let the public know about this.

  Michael Chertoff has been reading the papers every morning looking for information like this.  Is this what you call timely response to a crisis?

  No one could have foreseen that you would be putting this information on the web. I hope he sees this when he consults the papers again tomorrow morning. No wait, tomorrow is a holiday.

  by macdust on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 11:56:33 AM PDT

•  vehicles WERE getting

  to the convention center. The refugees at the CC talked right on CNN about police or national guard driving past and looking at them once in a while, just nobody at all helping them.

  by Elizabeth D on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:13:24 PM PDT

  •  The Convention Center

    was also where a National Guard truck drove by and dropped supplies off an overpass - bottles of water which smashed on impact. Unarmed people were repeatedly offering to get up there and carry it down for them.

    by thoughtseries on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:34:18 PM PDT

  •  Food & Water

    Not vehicles with food and water, which is my point. The news crews could get there, and they weren't walking in. You could see their SUVs in many of the wide shots they did there. What supplies went into the Superdome went within 150 or so vertical feet of the convention center.

    And anyone looking down off the bridge should have been able to spot the thousands of people there.

    by darrelplant on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:38:46 PM PDT

•  What Condimelda left out:

  
  "Condi, btw, said: 'Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race,' ...as she toured damaged parts of her native Alabama."

  What she left out was the fact that the preznit is more than willing to leave people unattended on the basis of race AND economic status.

  by caseynm on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 12:38:26 PM PDT

  •  Condimelda

    What is it with dictators' wives and shoes?

    by chantedor on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 01:02:40 PM PDT

    •  Hey, a girl's gotta look good when backing

      her man....

      by caseynm on Sun Sep 04, 2005 at 01:34:34 PM PDT

•  Absolutely they could have gotten there

  I know the area very well, my best friend in New Orleans has a house just down the road (walking distance) on Annunciation Street.  It's extremely easy access to the Convention Center, by design.  And the surrounding area stayed high and dry, being near the river.

  by playon on Wed Sep 07, 2005 at 12:45:05 AM PDT