Mike O’Hare, posting at Mark A. R. Kleiman’s blog finds even more unused school buses than I did:
If the Mayor and the Governor, and the governments they run, had been on their toes, those buses would have been rolling on Sunday at 6 AM full of the people we watched being plucked off roofs and drowning all last week, because they would have had a tested plan to execute.
Part of the plan would be a contract for contingent bus parking on (possibly) city-owned land out of town and above the flood plain, rented out for pasture otherwise, with a dormitory and dining room for, say 300 drivers. The fairgrounds of an upland county would be good for this. You could have two such locations, one east and one west, and decide which to use when the storm committed itself.
Or you could skip the dormitory and dining room and just have the drivers stay in the buses playing pinochle for the 12 hours the actual storm lasts, then use a few of the buses to bring them back to whatever part of the city was dry to wait either for the “all clear” or for the order to pick up the buses again and start shuttling evacuees back home, if the levees held and the power and water were on, or to more remote longer-term sites if necessary.
Any competently-run city in the hydrological and geomorphological situation of New Orleans would have a constantly updated register of contract drivers and extra sets of keys at City Hall, and every school bus and transit driver would have in his or her contract that she was to report to the garage with a lunchbox and her assigned emergency route map when the mayor said Boo.
In fact, I think it would have had a full-scale drill, combined with a big concert, fish fry, and bonfires when everyone came home in the evening. One more time: for decades this has been “a city that will at some point fill with water to the eaves.”
The Israelis (and the Swiss) can get an army in the streets in a couple of hours: butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers ready to shoot. Having evacuation transportation lined up at all times ready to roll is, I believe, exactly the same sort of basic government survival function for New Orleans, like the self-sufficient hospital up on a platform.
I certainly don’t think Louisianans dropping the ball makes national incompetence any less reprehensible, because I don’t believe in the death penalty by drowning or dehydration for voting wrong in the last election. But that they did in fact drop the ball is obvious, and was about as predictable as the storm itself.
See the photo. I lost count how many school buses are underwater.