In an earlier post this morning I complained that people should have left New Orleans before the hurricane. Since then I've thought about it a bunch. Most of the people I saw when I was in NO were quite poor.. like more poor than I've ever seen. I've heard that that the median income amoung blacks in the area is less than $12000 and I can totally believe that.
Furthermore the storm hit at the end of the month, a time when most poor people are even poorer since their checks come at the first of the month.
I now believe that most of the victims and refugess there were stuck there, that they couldn't leave even if they wanted to. They couldn't afford gas for their cars (if they had them), didn't have relatives outside of the area to go live with. They had no choice but to sit there and hope they could weather the storm.
From what I see on the news and the like, almost all of the people there are black and I would imagine that they all are in the situation I'm describing.
We had a duty to provide a way for these people to be safe. We knew the storm was coming and I would imagine the local government knew that most of their residents were too poor to leave on their own. Govenment, local and federal are at fault for the deaths there.
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