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
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20050912g
"...While the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a 'dead-head' train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. 'We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way,' said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "'The city declined.'"
They could have put National Guardsmen in the drivers seat.
Nothing to it. It's not like driving an 18 wheeler where you have to manage 10 unsynchronized gears and double clutch or "float" the shifts. You don't even have to be able to drive a regular manual shift - they're all automatic now.
Just keep it slow, and remember to turn wide!
Typical deadhead politician....impossible to think outside of the bureaucratic box or to think creatively...
The Mayor, Governor and local politicians -- were so over their head BEFORE the flood, that the flood simply overwhelmed them...
Semper Fi
>>>>Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) explained that the bus drivers, many of them women, “got afraid to drive.”
I though Landrieu said you can't get those people to work on a sunny day?
I worked for a large city government(larger than NOLA). We had an evacuation plan (and we aren't close to hurricane country). If we had needed to evacuate our city, public safety officials and fire fighters were a major part of the plan. And, all the rest of us knew what roles we would play. City employees understood they would be the last folks out of the city---after the vulnerable were safe. This Mayor is a joke.
1.They couldn't find enough people to drive the buses on a pretty day let alone with a storm coming,
2.They had the drivers but they were afraid of snipers,
3.The mayor was afraid of a potential lawsuit, and
4.Mayor Nagin was mad because the government wouldn't supply him with 500 Greyhound commercial buses to evacuate the helpless.
Of course, none of these begin to explain why he rejected Amtrack's offer to use one of its passenger trains there in New Orleans. But we all know the real reason, it was Bush's fault!!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1475443/posts
HURRICANE KATRINA- archive of links
various FR links & stories | 09-02-05 | the heavy equipment guy
Posted on 09/02/2005 6:35:55 AM EDT by backhoe
Spent all night with the FM in the motor pool and by morning could drive that sucker like a transportation jockey. Got some of the best (easiest) duties after that. Warm, dry, and like a teamster, never loaded or unloaded a cargo. Of course, my grunt buddies were always jealous.
Seems to me, it doesn't take an Einstein to drive a bus. I drove steel trucks during the summers when I was a college kid.
Bingo!
I don't believe that number. Look at the pictures. Parking garages were filled with cars. Walmarts had a traffic jam in its parking lot.
As another poster said if you gave free tickets to a concert 50 miles north of the city most of those people would have been out of NO in a flash.
The simplest solution would have been for the Louisiana National Guard to have manned the buses.
But, of course, that would have only been possible if Gov. Blanco ordered their mobilization.
You would expect that part of any "Evacuation Plan" emergency drivers designated PRIOR to the emergency would be called upon to evacuate the city (and save the buses by moving them to high ground. They never planned to use these buses and never made plans for anyone to drive them. I left work on Friday knowing NO would be hit, but they were surprised?
"You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans.”
Hurricane's "pend"? Hard to believe this guy was a business exec before this...
What is it to figure out? Can you drive a car?
The only challenge would be finding the keys.
Also, the police department in NO had three police boats, two of which were inoperable. Therefore they had one boat to do the initial rescues. The chief asked those officers who had boats and could get to them to bring them in to use in the rescues. The whole city is incompetent.
Amtrack offered 900 seats to Nagin on its last train out of NO. Nagin claimed he never got the message.
That was sarcasm. Yes, I can drive a car, and a "deuce and a half" and a five ton - and I have no doubt that I could figure out a bus in a minute and a half.
More to the point, so could anyone who's ever driven a military vehicle or a U-Haul truck...
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