The hurricane did not directly harm New Orleans. By Monday afternoon the hurricane had moved on it's way up into Mississippi, leaving New Orleans in the clear. People were celebrating in the streets that the hurricane missed them and that it was business as usual. It was after that that the levy broke and water started to slowly flood New Orleans. People were not evacuated because the engineers in charge of fixing the levy all thought that it would be fixed within a day and a couple of inches of water in the streets wouldn't hurt anyone, after all, New Orleans is below sea level and they're used to pumping water out of their city to keep it dry. After a couple of days did it become apparent that it wouldn't be fixed quickly and that the pumps weren't operating as intended to clear the city and by then the water had risen to dangerous levels.
I'm tired of everyone ragging about poorly this was handled in hindsight. I'm not a Bush person but when you follow the events you see that it was handled properly and only in hindsight was any of the planning wrong.
