Not to sound like a snob but you cannot do that. The poor people and stupid people need FEMA.

Anyone that depends on the government for help is screwed, I figured out that 4 hours after my first hurricane passed.

The only thing the National guard was used for here was to guard the entrance to trialer parks that were leveled after the storms to keep looters from stealing water soaked crushed and basically ruined possesions of the people that lived in there. :rolleyes:

I actually had no idea it was a hoax, Mike. It does seem like something that some one from that area would say. Mary Mapes style "fake, but accurate reporting" maybe.

I find the responses from those that have lived through both hurricanes and blizzards rather telling. I have been through neither (one of the "advantages" of living in the consistantly wet and mild Pacific Northwest). I can well imagine, after the descriptions given here, how different the post-storm survival problems are in a sub-freezing vs. tropical environment. I had honestly never considered the differences; yes, a bilzard does sound much more survivable.

At the end of the day, however, we do see a stark contrast between Houston and N.O. under the same circumstances. The reason for the difference, as became apparent in the aftermath, were the people living in the two locales. One population used to making do for themselves, another used to doing nothing. It seems to me that the blizzrad prone areas are more generally populated by the former. On the strength of that, while this particular story may very well be a hoax, I would venture to guess it has been repeated time and again for real. We just never hear about it.

I spent several weeks in NO a month after Katrina. In fact, we were scheduled to shoot Deja Vu and The Guardian before Katrina and we left, taking over 500 people with us, 4 days before. When i got back, I found that the NO Police didn't have so much as one case of bottled water for emergency supplies! I won't go on about NO and Nagin, but what we saw in terms of ANY emergency planning for hurricanes and flooding was absolutely nothing. WE put together a hurricane plan in July for both shows with everyone's contact info in NO, a triage plan for what to save and what to leave, where people would be transported to, and how. With over 100 vehicles leased, we lost one four door pickup truck, one Jeep and one trailer, because power to the building got shut off and we couldn't get the security gate open (we effed up, cause we looked for a manual release for the gate when we leased the building and we found it, but we didn't test it, it was inoperable). Why did we have a plan in advance for hurricanes? Simple, we knew we were going to NO during hurricane season and between the two shows, we were investing over $250 million. The results of Katrina were NO's own fault, not George Bush's. Remember the 100 plus flooded school buses in NO. A bunch of incompetent fools.

We did the same thing on Pirates of the Caribbean II in the Bahamas and we had plans to protect the Black Pearl, the Endeavor and all the other production and non-production ships. BTW, our plan for the Black Pearl was to haul it into an inner protected harbor and scuttle it and then refloat it after the hurricane, fortunately we didn't have to do that.

Sounds like a litly "disaster envy" to me.

No, more like disaster disgust. I work for corporate America and it kills me what some entities (notice I didn't say government or non-government) don't do, and then blame everyone except themselves.