New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Rings False Alarm

If you spent the last few days before hurricane Gustav made land listening to New orleans mayor Ray Nagin you would have thought that the world was coming to an end. He spent the whole last week talking about how Gustav was the biggest threat in the history of the universe. He said that Hurricane Gustav was ..."The mother of all Hurricanes"... and that if you lived in New Orleans ..."You had to get your butt outta town and start heading north out of the city"... and that if you were a tourist visiting the city ..."it was time for you to go"... and get out of town so you could save yourself.
Well Gustav made land on monday morning september 1st at about noon. It did not hit the city directly it was about 40 miles to the east which resulted in only a glancing blow to the city and minimal damage. Within hours it had shrunk to a category 1 hurricane which means that the most it was going to do by then was just rattle the trees a little bit and not much more.
Mayor Ray Nagin, who is if you listen to him closely enough one of the country's most entertaining speakers without really meaning to be, has since said that if he had to do it all over again he would play it exactly the same way and over sell the threat of the hurricane in order to get people to evacuate and leave the city. Well here is the problem with that. If you cry chicken enough times people are just going to stop listening to you. He went on and on about what a threat gustav was and in the end it turned out to be almost nothing. Estimates are that about 2 million people evacuated Louisiana in the last week because of the warnings from officials. How is Nagin going to hope to get people to respond to him the next time if they feel that this time around they were lied to about the extent of the threat? I understand that Nagin's heart was in the right place but he has to understand that people dont like to be mislead by their government officials and that when they are they get angry about it and they dont respond in the future at all. Credibility is important when one speaks and Nagin's took a hit this week. It's not his own fault but people are the way they are and if they see that you were not right about something they are going to hold it against you the next time around its just that simple.
The other thing about it is that we cant get into a habit of evcauating entire sections of the east coast of the country every time a hurricane threatens and forms in the atlantic ocean. You have to understand that about 95% of the time a hurricane is going to be what they usually are. They are going to be a threat but not a catastrophic threat. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was an anomoly. Most hurricanes are not that kind of a catastrophy. They will do some damage and kill some people ( in Gustav's case 8 people died) but they wont make the city look like it got hit by an atom bomb. The best thing to do is just board up your windows or tape up your windows and hunker down, pray and hope for the best. Life is full of threats and this is just another one of them. You have to just go through it and hope it all goes all right in the end. Usually it does for the most part.