This is
fascinating: On the day before Katrina hit New Orleans, everyone was told to evacuate.
From the New Yorker magazine, here’s the story.
“The Saturday before
the storm, I got a call from some French tourists who wanted to evacuate,” said
Pierre Lebovics, France’s consul-general in New Orleans. They went to the most logical
place, for Europeans: the train station. “Someone had decided to close the
railway station on the day they were telling people to evacuate. These tourists
found that quite extraordinary.”
Extraordinary, that’s
a polite way of saying stupid, idiotic, or incredibly stupid and idiotic.
A few weeks later,
a minor snafu* in Houston illustrated the futile nature of the car once again. It proved useless as an
evacuation mechanism.
The lessons. 1.
Americans still don’t see trains as transportation. 2. Europeans do, in fact
they see trains as more “logical” for transportation than cars. I was talking with a German-born auto
executive from Detroit, who told me, “Every one
in Europe has a car. And they drive them on
Sundays.” Yes, there are traffic jams
in Tokyo, Moscow and London. But they all are one perceptual step ahead of
us in transitioning to mass transit.
Snafu is an acronym the GIs created in WWII meaning:
Situation Normal, All Fouled Up
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