Fact and Fiction in Hurricane Katrina Blame Game

The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader have announced a joint bipartisan committee made up of senior members that will be tasked with reviewing, at all levels of government, the immediate preparation and recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

One of the problems to be explored is whether local officials failed to utilize every means necessary to evacuate the city of New Orleans as expeditiously as possible, including using hundreds of parked school buses and other mass transit vehicles which could have been used to help evacuate the city.

There are two sides to every issue and the "unbiased" media has had a field day pointing any available finger at the President, however a closer look at some of the facts that some may be leaving out of the story lead to very different conclusions:

"In New Orleans, those in peril and those in power have pointed the finger squarely at the federal government for the delayed relief effort. But experts say when natural disasters strike, it is the primary responsibility of state and local governments - not the federal government - to respond." (Dan Harris, "Who's to Blame for Delayed Response to Katrina?" ABC News, 9/6/2005)

WHO WAS IN CHARGE OF THE BUSES AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EFFORT? FACT: Available Buses Were Not Used To Evacuate Before The Hurricane: "Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why weren't those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm? A draft emergency plan, prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and obtained by NBC News, calls for "400 buses to ... evacuate victims." Yet those 200 buses were left in Katrina's path."

Yes, the Mayor of New Orleans failed his low-income residents and so did the Governor of Louisiana.

NOBODY was supposed to be left trapped in the New Orleans flood bowl death trap as 200,000 low-income residents were as a result of the gross and possibly criminal negligence on the part of the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, who failed to follow their own evacuation plan prior to the landfall of Katrina.

New Orleans is in a Storm Surge Zone, below sea level, and surrounded by levies that were only designed to withstand storms lass than a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane. That means that any person staying in New Orleans during a Category 3 or higher hurricane is facing a very high risk of death. Katrina was forecast as a Category 5 and hit as a Category 4.

What Is "Storm Surge" and Why It Matters.

The 2004 Hurricane Pam Exercise was modeled on a catastrophic destruction of New Orleans after only a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane. It was based on the assumption that there had been a complete evacuation of New Orleans. Shelters outside of the New Orleans flood bowl had already been identified:

The interagency shelter group identified the need for about 1,000 shelters for a catastrophic disaster. The shelter team identified 784 shelters and has developed plans for locating the remaining shelters.

Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes.(2004 New Orleans Disaster Prediction)

President Bush requested that Governor Blanco allow the Federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, and Governor Blanco, for political reasons, refused:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday..........The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they had been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals", said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

The Southeast Louisiana Evacuation plan supplement, revised in 2000, page 13, read paragraph 5, stated:

5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.

In spite of that, over four hundred New Orleans publicly owned buses, as counted by members of FreeRepublic on post-Katrina satellite images, remained parked in neat rows and 200,000 low-income New Orleans residents were left trapped in the ¡§New Orleans flood bowl¡¨ (as scientists call it) in the face of the incoming storm surge.

Those 400+ buses, at 70 passengers per bus, could have taken 28,000 of those low-income citizens per trip out of New Orleans on the inbound lanes that the Governor and Mayor inexplicably left unused during the evacuation.

As a result, 200,000 of the poorest residents of New Orleans were left trapped din a disaster waiting to happen with no where to go but the Superdome.

While 800,000 of New Orleans' residents with private transportation were being saved, 200,000 of New Orleans', low-income residents were left abandoned by the Governor and the Mayor in the New Orleans flood bowl to face a Category 4 Hurricane Storm Surge.

If the levies had failed catastrophically instead of at a few certain point as they did, the death toll would have reached Hiroshima proportions.

I-10 had contra lanes open. Either the picture is from before the contra lanes were going, or the picture isn't of the I-10.

A Freeper FreepMailed me that he had captured timed and dated Live-Cam images of the evacuation route with the inbound lanes closed to outbound traffic.

He has e-mailed those images to the FreeRepublic web master.

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Well, here is some more information on those pictures. The time stamps were in military time, so, here are the times.

These picture of the causeway, and other live webcams anyone could have seen in New Orleans before, during, ( I don't know now ) maybe, after the storm. These pictures were taken in ( I guess, 3 min or 5 mins apart) .

The first pictures cleary shows all of the vehicles coming out from NEW ORLEANS, and the inbound lanes wide open with no traffic at all ( either way ) on it.

1 # Picture time stamp. 8 / 28 / 2005 - HR : 16:21:02 PM
2# 8/28/05 - HR : 16:25:25 PM.
3# 8/28/05 - HR : 16:34:31 PM.
4# 8/28/05 - HR : 17:04:34 PM.
5# 8/28/05 - HR : 18:52:19 PM.

I was mistaken before, these pictures were taken last Sunday evening.

From picture 1 to 3 , you can see many vehicles getting out of New Orleans, and there are very dark ominious cloud in the sky, and from picture 3 to 4, the traffice starts to clear to a trickle, and the clouds clear up some, but, in the last picture, there are no vehicles on the N.O. causeway.

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