WhosDrunk.....as far as I know, the crime rate in Houston skyrocketed when the New Orleans overflow moved in. The majority of people this city housed, fed and doctored for a year, without cost to them I might add, as well as Fema who gave them apartments, furniture, clothing and education, were pretty much the lower class, riff-raff of Burbon Street. And how do they repay us? By stealing, injuring and killing Houstonians, as well as their own.

And once more, had the levees held,

Mandatory evacuations to begin Sunday morning in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city beginning 8 a.m. Sunday but urged residents to consider escaping "the mother of all storms" before then.

"You need to be scared," Nagin said of the Category 4 hurricane tearing along Cuba's western coast. "You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century."

The city's west bank is to evacuate at 8 a.m.

Nagin said the city had evacuated roughly 10,000 people Saturday on buses, trains and planes, in addition to the thousands who left on their own. Buses from collection points would continue running until midnight and resume at 6 a.m. Sunday, he said.

"This storm is so powerful and growing more powerful every day," Nagin said. "I'm not sure we've seen anything like this."

At 8 p.m. ET, Gustav's eye was over western Cuba near Los Palacios, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west-southwest of Havana, with sustained winds near 150 mph.

Hurricanes are ranked 1 to 5 in intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale. A Category 4 has winds of 131 to 155 mph and can cause extreme damage.

"This storm could be as bad as it gets," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Saturday afternoon. "We could see flooding even worse than we saw in Hurricane Katrina."

New Orleans joined the growing list of local governments in south Louisiana ordering mandatory evacuations on Saturday and Sunday as Gustav roared past Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/08/30/gustav.prepare/index.html

Everyone I have know that has ever known anything about that area has always said "one day a bad hurricane will come and wipe New Orleans off the face of the map", now why didn't the people do their part and force La. leaders to resign if there were not going to do anything to protect it's people and start working on that problem years ago?
You don't build a HOUSE on a less than solid foundation. It would have been a lot cheeper to begin buying up property and relocating people to higher ground years ago through fedreal and local grants than the mess ALL the UNITED STATES TAX PAYERS have to pay now.
Then to turn around and blame it all on the government is really a slap in the face. Where are the people that live there? Why are they not/were not in an uproar with a government they let fail them knowing "if it ever hit's" ?
We all knew what would eventually happen, no one that lived there did anything, all those years. Just held there breath. Then, cry foul and government failure. The communities have the power to elect people that will do their will. The communities have the power to force them out if they do not the people's will.
We all need to stop whinning and take better care of bussiness or we'll all be "down the river anyway".

[.....]as far as I know, the crime rate in Houston skyrocketed when the New Orleans overflow moved in. The majority of people this city housed, fed and doctored for a year, without cost to them I might add, as well as Fema who gave them apartments, furniture, clothing and education, were pretty much the lower class, riff-raff of Burbon Street. And how do they repay us? By stealing, injuring and killing Houstonians, as well as their own.

Maybe if those people had gotten off their lazy butts years ago, by working honest jobs instead of living off their state, they would have had money to buy cars so they could have gotten the hell out of Dodge like everyone else!