Posted on 09/20/2005 8:05:49 AM PDT by Valin
The buses alone tell the story.
At the city level, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin essentially ignored the city’s official evacuation plan for hurricanes which calls for the use of school buses and city-owned transit buses to evacuate the population in advance of a major storm.
Most vulnerable were the estimated 134,000 people in the city without cars. The official way out was to be the 550 municipal buses and 254 usable school buses (70 of the city’s 324 school buses were broken down) that the city had at its disposal.
Do the math. With 804 buses and 60 seats per bus, the city had the assets to evacuate 48,240 people per trip. To cover 134,000 people, that’s three trips. And there was no shortage of time. Nagin declared a state of emergency and a “voluntary” evacuation on Saturday, August 27, and Katrina didn’t make landfall until Monday, August 29.
In its Sunday edition, August 28, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that a computer model at the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center was projecting a storm surge of as much as 16 feet moving up the Mississippi and flooding over the city’s levees. “And the model,” warned the Times-Picayune, “doesn’t take into account the 5- to 10-foot waves that would be on top of the surge, which could top levees all along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain.”
Still, with the exception of a few bus runs, primarily in the Parish of Plaquemines, the supply of municipal buses and school buses went basically unused. Instead, by the hundreds, they were neatly parked in rows in low-lying city lots.
As a footnote, it appears that the Coffee Lady played a key role in Nagin’s failure to adequately evacuate the city. At a time when people can hit the jackpot for spilling coffee on themselves, the mayor, according to news reports, backed away from issuing a mandatory evacuation order for fear of being hit with a lawsuit. Reported the Times-Picayune on the morning before the storm hit: “Nagin said late Saturday that he’s having his legal staff look into whether he can order a mandatory evacuation of the city, a step he’s been hesitant to do because of potential liability on the part of the city for closing hotels and other businesses.”
Also on Saturday evening, Nagin announced that the Superdome would be open only to people with special needs, starting at 8 a.m. Sunday. “Citizens must call 568-3200 to verify that they qualify for admittance to the shelter,” explained the city. “Phone lines will open at 7 a.m.” There was no official word on how the parked buses correlated with getting special needs people to the Superdome.
Additionally, Nagin advised anyone with special needs to bring along food, water and a folding chair. Tami Frazier, a spokeswoman for the mayor, stressed that the city didn’t want these special needs evacuees to plan on staying at the Superdome for too long. They should, instead, make arrangements to leave the city as soon as possible. But not by school bus. Those vehicles would be roof-deep in flood water by Monday afternoon.
U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D, Louisiana), on September 4, explained on FOX News Sunday why the buses weren’t used: “Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out in the city in front of a hurricane.”
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) explained that the bus drivers, many of them women, “got afraid to drive.”
And as Mayor Nagin explained to Tim Russert: “Sure, there was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans.”
On Tuesday, August 30, with most of New Orleans underwater and things turning chaotic at the Superdome, Gov. Blanco ordered the facility to be evacuated. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, run by the ex-head of the International Arabian Horse Association, asked the Department of Transportation, or DOT, for 300 ambulances. “Almost 18 hours later,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “FEMA canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, ‘the DOT doesn't do ambulances.’”
At last count, no Arabian horses were lost in the flooding.
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Why didn't they put the call out for qualified drivers to volunteer to drive the buses?
I think we know why.
That's just bull. I'm sure there would have even been qualified volunteers to drive the busses had there only been a request for people to drive their fellow citizens to safety. In America we've seen over and over that average people are more than willing to help if they know of a task needing doing. Were I in NO and the call had gone out for people to drive those busses I'd have done it. And I have no doubt there were an abundance of people in NO who would have also. And plenty of them would have been good people wanting to just help - not all looters.
Trains could have been used as well.
Screw the qualified drivers. a 16 year old kid saved his family and a busload of folks by hot-wiring a bus from a lot and driving it to Houston.
In an emergency, you drop the requirements for qualified union help and take what you can get.
(He'll probably face charges for auto theft)
Interesting that 70 out of 322 buses were out of service. Just illustrates yet another failure of the city ungovernment. If those buses were in private hands I can assure that they would be getting preventive maint. and that only 4-5 would be out of service. What this really says is that because NO is so inefficient for school bus maint. they have to buy an additional 70 buses. The welfare state at work!!!
I've never driven a school bus - but I'm pretty sure if my life depended on it, I could figure it out.
I can understand that municiple workers like union bus drivers having no sense of community, but why not a call for volunteer drivers? It would be interesting to check with the LA Dept of Motor Vehicles and see just how many people within the area have CDLs and could have easily and safely manned those busses. I'd bet there are many thousands of qualified drivers and they only needed to come up with a few hundred.
BS answer. If a category 5 hurricane is headed towards you, you better have the buses loaded and out of town before the winds are at tropical storm levels. Thus the drivers AREN'T STAYING BEHIND IN THE HURRICANE!
It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Nagin has removed all doubt.
"unions"
Memo to Dallas resident Nagin: Don't you think you should have had your city attorney look into that FRIGGIN' LONG AGO, instead of TWO DAYS BEFORE A MAJOR HURRICANE THREATENED?
And probably a third of those would not have left anyway. So that only means two trips. With the drivers evacuating on the last trip. This should have started first thing Saturday morning and wrapped up by EOD Saturday.
What a shame. 134,000 evacuees and none of them knew how to drive a bus.
"You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans.”
Just a thought, but couldn't the bus drivers gather their own families, put them on the bus and then pick up others? That way, the bus drivers, their families and thousands of others would have been evacuated. Sounds simple enough to me!
The important thing was did Nagin ever even asked to use the buses? All the excuses such as lack of drivers or no other city would accept the bussed persons is just excuses if he never ever thought of using the buses in the first place.
From what I saw it looked like the Mayor didn't think New Orleans was going to get hit anyway. He reminds me of the Mayor in "Jaws" that ignored the shark attacks for his tourist trade.
"New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin essentially ignored the city’s official evacuation plan for hurricanes which calls for the use of school buses and city-owned transit buses to evacuate the population in advance of a major storm."
We have a press release and several quotes from Blanco that stated, Nagin had NO AUTHORITY to evacuate the city.
Nagin was merely the black figure head for the Plantation Princesses Landrieu and Blanco.
I've noticed a pattern in MSM reporting that seems to keep publicily shifting blame to Nagin. Let's not let Landrieu and Blanco off the hook of responsibility.
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