[Prudence]

My question:

When will we start seeing evidence of lessons learned and plans to handle things differently next time?

For example: do "mandatory evacuations" need to become more mandatory? If so, how to make that happen? There has to be a shift in the risk analysis before people will obey the orders. Not evacuating, even if the storm doesn't develop, needs to be worse than evacuating. I can easily imagine deciding that I'd been through bad storms before and survived, and that if I evacuate, I'll live in cramped, noisy quarters with several thousand of my closest personal friends, while my home is looted of anything valuable by those who remained behind.

Especially after this storm -- the Legend of the Superdome will linger and grow and evacuation will seem even less attractive.

So, since mobilizing support services after the storm appears expensive and time consuming, and because support services can't spend the entire hurricane season on alert, what can be done to make mandatory evacuation orders more attractive to follow?

(Also, if a functional solution is found, think about how disaster ready this nation would be. If systems were in place to quickly and relatively easily evacuate populated areas, if evacuated property were protected from looting or other human damage, if shelter areas were safe, sanitary, and as attractive as a shelter can be, and if these evacuations were, of necessity, practiced several times a year in different areas, we would be so much better able to respond to any disaster, whether natural or man-made.)