WHAT A MANDATORY EVACUATION DOES

Corps of Engineers admits sandbag error
Sep 15, 12:31 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government should have pre-positioned more sandbags and helicopters in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina struck so that repairs to broken levees could have started sooner, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.

"In retrospect I would say yes, we could have, we should have, in anticipation of this," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told a Pentagon news conference.

"The challenge in New Orleans is that we knew that this system would not protect against a category four or five event," he added, referring to hurricane intensity levels above the category 3 storm for which New Orleans' levees were designed to protect.

In evacuating the city, some of key emergency response capabilities were lost, Strock said.

"The people who would normally be up on the levees looking for weak spots and respond immediately were gone from the city," he said. "So that is one of the things that made it difficult for us to respond here."