have this many people (Katrina + Rita) ever before in US history been

[bobbieinok]

evacuated??????

[jobycom]

1. Not counting Native Americans and using the term "evacuated"

euphamistically? I don't think so.

[bobbieinok]

3. of course not counting Native Americans....or Africans brought as slaves

meant as the result of natural disasters

[mcscajun]

2. Nope...

Katrina caused the biggest mass evacuation in U.S. history, surpassing the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. In terms of numbers permanently displaced, the only event that might have been bigger than Katrina is the Civil War.

http://www.epodunk.com/top10/diaspora/

The same claim can be found on many other sources...this is just the one I had handy. There's a great graphic illustrating the diaspora, as well.

[Lars39]

4. The most recent US analogy is the Dust Bowl migration, 2.5 million.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/peopleevents/pandeAMEX08.html

[wellstone_democrat]

7. that was over quite a few years though

at least 10 years of out-migration from the plains

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. No, not since the Civil War

[KharmaTrain]

6. We're 300 million and growing...

There's really no precedent here as both times and geography and chaged.

This really wasn't an evacuation, since there was no plan for where these people to go. All that was said was "head for the hills"...and everyone in Houston hit the roads at the same time. As always, there's an over-reaction in the wake of a tragic event and politicians didn't want to look, after the fact, that they did nothing beforehand, put up the red flags.

For the folks in the hardest hit areas...Lake Charles, Beaumont and Port Arthur, this was a wise move...the rest now looks like a lot of fear and fear mongering.

Boy, am I glad to be writing this today compared to what I was expecting 24 hours ago. But this storm isn't over yet, but at this point, the damage is bad, but not of the scope we saw with Katrina.

As far as evacuating a city? Look at the history of wars. The Warsaw Ghetto was a city within a city that held nearly 1,000,000 people in 1942 and was all but cleared out 2 years later.

Peace...