#12 I heard one of the LSU professors (Traffic Engineer) yesterday talking on Hannity's show (this professor actually wrote part of the City's Evacuation Plan in hurricanes) and he just stated the facts (as engineers are used to doing). He claims the City (alone) had over 300 school buses AND 500 City transportation buses. Assuming you'd actually watched the storm (remember it hit Cat 5 on Saturday after lunch, I believe, even going up to 175+ mph SUSTAINED winds at one point Sat.) and called for evacuation using all of those resources, you could've saved THOUSANDS! I believe someone here at RB did the #s before on the school buses, but here's my rough estimate:
* 450 City buses (assume 90% function; probably low, but this is New Orleans) at say 40 people/bus = 18,000 people (you could probably pack more in if you wanted).
* 270 School buses (again, assuming 90% are functional) at say 30 people/bus (this low too, but I'm being conservative) = 8,100 people
NOW, assume you started this on Saturday. You could've made say at least 2 trips to Baton Rouge, and possibly 3, if you went on in to Sunday. Even if you just planned logistics on Saturday, and made only 1 trip to Baton Rouge (or wherever else) on Sunday, that's still 23,000+ people you wouldn't have had to pick off houses or find their corpses now in their attics. At 2 runs to Baton Rouge (1 round trip, and the 2nd, you'd just stay in Baton Rouge), you could've evacuated 46,000+ peeps. And, that's not including all the cab drivers, etc. that may have helped out. Even if the Mayor's estimate of 20% of the City staying behind (approx. 100,000 people) was right, we all know that not 100% of those people COULDN'T find a way out. Say even 75% for some reason couldn't get out...to save well over 50% of them, just by using the City's own buses would've been impressive. It's even come out now that the Director of the Nat'l Hurricane Center called the Mayor at home on Saturday and told him point blank what this would do to "his" city (and that's when we pretty much knew it would hit N.O. directly or close enough to breech the levees, probably) and even probably told him to evacuate RIGHT THEN! Mayor didn't call for "mandatory" evacuation until Sunday, I believe, only 18 hours before the storm hit. |
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin garnered a ton of publicity with a profanity-laced interview he gave to WWL radio last Thursday, where he blasted President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco for not coming to rescue his city in time. However, Nagin's most newsworthy comments - where he explained why he didn't use hundreds of city school buses to evacuate his city's flood victims - went almost unnoticed. Turns out, Nagin turned his nose up at the yellow buses, demanding more comfortable Greyhound coaches instead. "I need 500 buses, man," he told WWL. "One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here." Nagin described his response: "I'm like - you've got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans." While Nagin was waiting for his Greyhound fleet, Katrina's floodwaters swamped his school buses, rendering them unusable.