[Hugh R]

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.