Nagin finally asked people to evacuate on Sunday morning for a storm that hit his city sometime after midnight that night. By that point, Amtrak had left the city with rail cars sans passengers. Airlines had evacuated Louis Armstrong International Airport with planes sans travelers. And school buses sat in their lots, soon to be flooded and ruined. The mayor’s incompetence cost lives.

While I was urging people to leave New Orleans, Mayor Nagin announced a “shelter of last resort,” the New Orleans Superdome. In other words, despite calls to evacuate, if you choose not to evacuate, or are now unable to evacuate because you lack transportation, run to the Superdome.

I was livid.

If you watch a video subsequently leaked to the media, you hear me exclaiming to the mayor and governor that the Superdome should not be a shelter of last resort. Our engineering reports had predicted the Superdome would not withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and at the time, Katrina was rated a Category 5. Those reports were proven correct when the roof was ripped out, the stadium was surrounded by 8 to 12 feet of water and the power went out.