Badtux the Snarky Penguin points out things that I didn’t take into consideration when I complained about the school buses being underwater:
# However, even if he had dispatched armed officers to seize the buses (which were guarded by OPSD police), there wasn’t enough buses there to be worthwhile. Media Matters has documented that there existed approximately 600 usable buses within the city limits of New Orleans, including the OPSB fleet and Nagin’s own Regional Transit Authority (note that the RTA provided transportation for middle school and high school students using the normal city buses, so the Orleans Parish School Board had fewer buses than you would expect of a district its size). The nearest high ground is a 3 hour drive away under normal traffic conditions on the three (3) land routes out of New Orleans. According to witnesses, these highways were so crowded with private automobiles that it instead took 7 hours to reach that high ground. Thus the buses would have been able to make at most one trip. Meaning that the *only* way to completely evacuate the 100,000+ people left in the city after those with autos fled was to have 1500+ buses already prepositioned within the city. Which would be difficult even under the best of conditions — the entire Greyhound Inc. bus fleet is only 1950 buses!
# Nagin instead decided to evacuate anybody who couldn’t leave on their own to the Superdome, which was designed to withstand 200mph winds, using the existing city bus fleet (which was entirely adequate for that purpose). An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes Nagin setting up 12 neighborhood collection points (note that New Orleans is geographically a fairly small city) from whence people would be carried to the Superdome via the city buses.
# Nagin is also faulted for not putting the buses on “high ground” in order to use for Stage II of the evacuation plan he put into place (the one that called for people to be evacuated to the Superdome, and from there to high ground a three hour drive away). The question of what qualifies as “high ground” remains. The City has precious little of that. The riverfront parking garage is mostly below ground (i.e. they would have been swamped there). The upper decks of the Superdome parking garage were well above water, but their exit ramps were under 4 feet of water. The parking garages of most downtown buildings were also below ground and thus under water. The notion of parking them on the elevated freeway is utterly ludicrous — the winds of a Category 4 hurricane would have tumbled them like chess pieces, completely blocking the freeway and rendering it unusable for the Phase II evacuation. It’s unclear where you could park 265 city buses on the surface streets of the French Quarter, about the only “high ground” in the city. I don’t know what the final disposition of the city bus fleet was, but given the situation, I really can’t fault the mayor for saying “f’it, we’ll let the state and the feds figure out how to do stage II if we need it.”
I didn’t take into account that it was a 200 mile wide hurricane, with variance in directions, it would have been hours driving just to get out of the path of the wind and find shelter. There was dang little high ground to be had. In too many cases, there was nothing to be done but to ride it out where you could.
Which makes the response to the people left in town even worse.
Don’t roll over quite so easily, Glenn. Figure 569 buses (including both school and NORTA), 60 or so passengers each, six hour round trips to get people out of NO and you’ve got about 50,000 who could have been bused out on Sunday alone after the mandatory evacuation order. Even after the flooding, there was a dry route west from the dome out of the city. And if the buses had been in service or moved before the storm, they wouldn’t have flooded and would still be useful today.
Democrat defenders are just spinning away Nagin’s and Blanco’s incompetence and blaming Bush. The mayor and gov melted down in a crisis and didn’t follow their own plans, which called for the use of city buses to move car-less residents.
“Democrat defenders are just spinning away Nagin’s and Blanco’s incompetence and blaming Bush.”
Well I guess that just makes Bush blameless!
How dare Democrats point out that the levee system was underfunded, that a political hack was appointed as head of FEMA, that a good number of first reponders (the Natl Guard) and half of their equipment are being used to fight OVERSEAS, and that it took a good week for Bush to put down the guitar and realize Brownie wasn’t doing such a heck of a good job after all…You want to talk incompetence bp, we’ve been looking at it in the White House for 4 1/2 years.
But as long as you want to go there, the Republican ‘blame the local and state’ game is friggin beside the point. I don’t care about Louisiana local officials. Period. Nagin was a Republican before he entered the election for Mayor, so go figure. At any rate, I didn’t elect those guys and I don’t have to suffer their incompetence. I’m sure my Republican governor doesn’t have his head up his ass and could manage to do a decent job with evacuations. Am I convinced that FEMA and the feds could back him up if they had to? No way, not with 4 years of cronyism and pork-barrel homeland security spending. This is why this latest spin just doesn’t stick.
Bush has shown mind-blowing incompetence from day one. I’m glad he’s taking ‘responsibility’ but I would like some accountability to go along with that.
I like Jeff Taylor’s comment:
Had there been a futures market on buses in New Orleans, the value of the buses would have skyrocketed as Katrina approached, signaling their increased utility in the emergency. But even without such an overt market signal, any private owner of the vehicles would have exhausted all opportunities to save his or her property. Nobody who owned such a potentially valuable product would have done what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did: let it all go to waste on the assumption that drivers would be impossible to find. Greyhound, after all, did not leave hundreds of its buses to be destroyed. And, of course, this very fact caused Nagin to scream for “every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country” to come to the aid of his city. And it should go without saying that no private employer would long tolerate a workforce that, in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s memorable description of New Orleans public sector workers, has trouble coming to work even on sunny days.
I don’t know what the final disposition of the city bus fleet was, but given the situation, I really can’t fault the mayor for saying “f’it, we’ll let the state and the feds figure out how to do stage II if we need it.”
So the mayor expected the feds to implement part 2 of the City plan…oooookay. I guess they were going to have to bring their own buses as well–sure hope the hurricane left the roads into New orleans untouched! GREAT plan!
Nagin was a Republican before he entered the election for Mayor, so go figure.
Uh oh, if this becomes a popular Democratic talking point you know the guy is toast.
But even without such an overt market signal, any private owner of the vehicles would have exhausted all opportunities to save his or her property. Nobody who owned such a potentially valuable product would have done what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did: let it all go to waste on the assumption that drivers would be impossible to find.
Now here, I have to disagree. Why? Because I saw too many privately owned cars on the street after Katrina hit, including one SUV and sports car that were crushed under a building collapse. Why weren’t they taken out?
Uhm, make that a 14 hour round trip. Under the “contraflow” evacuation plan, all lanes (both inbound and outbound) on the three four-lane highways out of town were used for outbound traffic. That left only the inbound lanes on the two 2-lane highways into town for use by incoming traffic, and according to my relatives in the New Orleans area, those were clogged too by people who’d been outside the area on business, coming back into the area in order to help their family pack up for the evacuation.
Finally, there is the general refusal to believe on the part of people in the New Orleans area. Until it actually bore down upon New Orleans in that last 24 hours, nobody in New Orleans really believed that this was going to be the Big One, the one that finally put New Orleans underwater. Too many hurricanes in the past were called “the big one” only to have the hurricane decline in size until it was no longer a threat, or veer off to the east or west where it was no longer a threat. It was not until that last 24 hours that everybody woke up and, in shock, realized that this was *it*, the Big One that had been predicted for decades, and thus it was time to get the **** out of town.
And it wasn’t just the politicians who had a rude awakening. It was the people too. A lot of people, maybe 40% of the population, evacuated on Saturday when the National Weather Service started issuing warnings that it looked like Katrina was going to be a direct hit upon New Orleans. But it wasn’t until Sunday and all those apocalyptic warnings from the National Weather Service plus their mayor and their governor and their President saying that this was it, this was The Big One, that the majority of the population realized that it was time to get out town. Until those people were ready to go, the only way to evacuate them would be at gunpoint. The City of New Orleans had maybe 1500 active-duty police officers for a city of 470,000. You do the math — there’s no way they’re going to be able to force 250,000 people to leave until they’re ready to go unless you have a *lot* more than 1500 police officers to do it with.
So I stand by my conclusion that there simply were not enough buses. I’ve sat in that traffic jam leading out of New Orleans during a hurricane, and it was clear and obvious to anybody who’s ever done that, that any plan to evacuate the entire city prior to a hurricane was wishful thinking. There was even a LSU professor who proved it with math — that it would take a minimum of 72 hours to evacuate 100% of the people over the 14 lanes available for evacuation.
There’s a lot of blame to be passed around here, from an ineffectual governor to Bush administration officials unable to coordinate the relief effort due to having their butts stuck up their behinds about what it takes, but Mayor Nagin, in my opinion, is getting a bum rap on this whole bus thing. I’ve been there, unlike all you armchair commandos out there, and from my perspective as a Louisiana refugee, he did exactly what he should have done — get the people to the Superdome, and then hope like **** that someone would come rescue him because in the aftermath of the Big One it was clear (from the Hurricane Pam exercise) that any resources the city had would be drowned. All this armchair noodling is fine and dandy, but unless you’ve actually been there, you have *no idea*. Period. Evacuating New Orleans was a mess, and buses were the least of the problems.
(BTW: If we want to start thinking out of the box: I also saw pictures of a drowned freight yard with hundreds of boxcars, each of which could have carried hundreds of people to safety… why don’t I hear criticism of FEMA and the Department of Transportation for not ordering the railroads to use those boxcars for evacuating people? Oh I forget, that would violate the “Rove vs. Waders” strategy of blaming the victims…).
– Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
Finally, there is the general refusal to believe on the part of people in the New Orleans area. Until it actually bore down upon New Orleans in that last 24 hours, nobody in New Orleans really believed that this was going to be the Big One, the one that finally put New Orleans underwater.
Oh I forget, that would violate the “Rove vs. Waders” strategy of blaming the victims…).
So on the one hand you blame the public for ignoring and not believing the fact that a city that is below sea level is a bad place to be during a hurricane…and then you criticize those who blame the victims?
That said, I hope you and your familiy are doing well. Any word on your property?
Sorry, but it seems like you HAVE to criticize Nagin for not using those bues. It doesn’t matter a damn bit that they would not have evacuated everyone – it matters that they could have evacuated SOME.
And yet they sat there.