OT: What road are they able to use to get evacuees out of New Orleans

Good question. Try this page?

There's "State Police Road and Incident Site" and "Evacuation Corridor Maps" links half-way down the page.

There is no road, that's the trouble. If there was a road, there would be food and water by now.

I have to wonder why they don't bring in the heavy lift choppers and drop portable offices and semi trailers full of stuff, or lower trailers to fill with stranded survivors and carry them out to high ground where they can be moved along to whatever is the next step on the raod to recovery ...

I haven't seen anyone yet mention rail lines as a way of bringing in goods. N.O. is the terminus for a lot of north-south lines. They may be flooded, but no one has mentioned them yet. 10 hours from Chicago to Memphis and only a few more to New Orleans if they can get through.

I also don't see any one mentioning amateur radio as an alternate communications source. Very strange. Hams have helped with communications after every hurricane since 1938 among other things. There were hams at the WTC disaster for several days.

Charles of Kankakee

My guess is they wouldn't want to put trains onto flooded tracks. Perhaps it just me, but I think that the ground under a flooded track hasn't got the intergrity that would be required to support a train.

Yes, but there was both power and means for people to survive for a few days on their own. Here, there is no power, no fuel, no way to cook. There is nothing, except several feet of raw sewage.

And, people that have HAM licenses are generally a pretty smart bunch as a group, and they are likely to have left the area before they got into trouble.

I happen to agree with your premise, but there are plenty of reasons why the premise hasn't panned out.

I think the most viable means of emergency travel, especially to get supplies into the area, is by air. I agree that putting people in semi trailers and lifting them out by helicopter is dangerous, I just don't seem many alternatives to a situation where wading through waist deep sewage is the order of the day. Given the health hazards of walking around in sewage, being air lifted in a cargo container for a few miles seems like a logical alternative.

There's a couple of articles on this page (warning: very long) that touch on the roads situation:

It's organized with most recent at the top, oldest at the bottom. There's a recent article on the causeway being closed but not severely damaged (maybe usable once inspection is complete) and another posted Tuesday, 8:05am (a series of articles at that time) about the only way out of New Orleans being West.

Seems to me there's a lot more on this page than one gets from the talking heads.

Well, thoughout most of the South, the train tracks are placed on raised roadbeds because of the possibility of flooding. They do have to go slow, but as long as the tracks are above the flood, they can move stuff. Most box cars can hold nearly 100 tons, that's nearly 3 trailer loads.

There are a lot of hams that are members of emergency organizations and have their own backup power and etc, just for this sort of thing. They would be willing to stay behind and help with the aftermath . . . Many of them are also members of the Red Cross or Salvation Army. There have been hams doing so for decades. We have several hams here in Kankakee that are set up to be able to work without power and without a commercial repeater to work through in case of tornadoes, for instance. That has happened several times here.

Charles of Kankakee

Aha. Real facts, not the yellow journalism of the spin doctors or the sound bites of the infantile media.

It looks like they could use the causeway for moving things, too. That would give them two working roadways. The speed at which the problem gets worked depends on bandwidth, and two working arteries are twice as much as one. Like Ground Zero, it looks like there is a lot of rubbish that is going to have to be removed after the streets get dryed out. Also, with two working arteries, the Corps can bring in twice as much equipment and get cracking on getting N.O. dried out.

Chicago used to do the same thing prior to the 1850's downtown. Most of the downtown was at the level of the lake. The streets were muddy, nasty little vermin were everywhere. When it rained, the streets became impassable. Sometime around the Civil War, Chicago raised the streets 20 feet. Now it seems to me if N.O. did something like that, it would get them above sea level and the streets would have drained dry pretty much on their own.

Charles of Kankakee

"Charles @ Kankakee" wrote: snip

Charles, you'll find that hams are a very much behind the scenes type of person quite unwilling to toot their own horns. You'll likely hear lots about them after the dust settles. God knows that those poor people down there need all the help that anyone can give them.

The one thing that hasn't happened yet is the FCC hasn't sent out a bulletin restricting traffic on certain frequencies to traffic to/from the Gulf. for emergency and Health/Welfare traffic. I checked their website yesterday. Usually when there is a disaster this big, FCC will dedicate several subbands to the necessary work. Unless they think they don't need us anymore and the internet can handle it all. . . . Yeah, right. I wanted to find out where I could at least listen to traffic. My 706 Mk II G needs me to find the power supply, but right now if I found it, I couldn't lift it.(I still have weight restrictions on lifting until Oct 20th from the bypass surgery.) (That's what I get for letting 5 people unload the moving van. I've got my radio and my antenna, but I can't find the power supply or my MFJ tuner box. And they broke one leg off my stand for my 2 meter J-beam.)

Charles N5HSR/9

>

Yeah, Useful Suff. I liked this. I wonder how good that paper is under normal circumstances.

Note that the link seems to include a date. This page seems to be the one getting the updates now:

Thanks. I'll check it out.

It turns out the train tracks are largely washed out.

The reports I've seen have only dealt with the CSX tracks, but I've been out of internet range for most of the last 3 days. . . .

Charles of Kankakee