New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin clarified comments he made praising the Cuban system of disaster preparation. The mayor Tuesday said he was trying to make the point that in an emergency, leaders need to agree on who's going to run point.
"We can't do what Cuba does, but we surely can get to the point where, as a major catastrophic event, that we have somebody who's in authority," said Nagin.
Nagin said as he toured Cuba with government leaders, he never got the impression that during emergencies, people were being threatened if they didn't evacuate.
"We didn't get the sense that there was extreme pressure from the government to evacuate," Nagin said. "The citizens are well educated, they're well trained, and they respond."
Nagin said he's working with other members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors to draft proposals for a new model for disaster management, including designating the federal government as the central authority.
In an earlier interview, Mayor Nagin said that concerning evacuation, "one of the biggest weaknesses we had during Hurricane Katrina is it wasn't clear who was the top authority."
In that previoius interview with the Associated press, Nagin went on to say: "The president and the governor were going back and forth; In Cuba you don't have that problem..The government says, 'This is what we're doing, these are the resources we are going to deploy, ' and it pretty much happens."
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