The average Joe does not really know the impact untill it's hjit. People on the street are not educated enough to know exactly how bad the hurrican will be and they didn't know that the city flood defences would cave in like that. Y'ou don't know how sweet the mango is, untill you taste it yourself'. Besides , there's been some reports that the barrier that caved in needed work doing to it and the city never paid for it.
Other than that, people naturally don't like to leave their homes, many hurricanes have hit and people survive so why would this have been different to the average Joe. Oh yes, we now know that waves hit as well and flood barriers broke.
THe state should have organised buses to actually take these people somewhere. To evacuate 250,000 people is the duty of the state. These residents didn't even have money for food, where would they have gotten accomodation.
Seriously, i'm more and more convinced that if this had hit Texas then none of these problems and breakdown in the operation of saving people would have happened.