Need help with freeper e-mail re: buses not used...I know I saw

[Saphire]

a post about why Nagin didn't use the flooded school-buses, but I cant find it now. Help me to respond to an email.

[blogslut]

1. ask them

who was supposed to drive those buses?

[nyhuskyfan]

4. And where they were supposed to take all those people...

Without some outside assistance with getting access to shelters, army bases, etc.

The bottom line, though, is that there was never going to be 100% evacuation. The models from the dry run last year (Hurricane "Pam") anticipated 65 percent evacuation, New Orleans did achieve an 80 percent. Pointing at the buses is just a distraction to try to deflect blame away from the appalling relief effort from the government.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

2. Snopes, as always

http://www.snopes.com/photos/katrina/buses.asp

[lectrobyte]

9. Thanks, snopes really nails it.

Whether this photograph truly represents a lost opportunity to have evacuated a substantial number of New Orleans residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina is difficult to assess. Such a claim presumes an availability of resources (e.g., experienced drivers, fuel) and workable logistics (e.g., sufficient means of notifying and getting residents to departure points, sufficiently clear roads for multiple trips out of town and back, adequate facilities within a reasonable driving distance capable of providing shelter, food, and water to a large number of people for an indeterminate period of time on short notice) that may or may not have been present. (There's no guarantee that all the buses shown in this picture were even in working condition.)

[CottonBear]

3. Here's a link: Very few bus drivers (w/ C-SB licenses) left to drive buses

<snip>
Nagin appeared on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning and was grilled by moderator Tim Russert over his failure to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans on the Friday before Katrina’s arrival, coinciding with Bush’s advance declaration of an emergency, while public transit and school buses were still available for use to transport evacuees.

“That’s one of the things that will be debated,” Nagin conceded. “There has never been a catastrophe in the history of New Orleans like this. There has never been any Category 5 storm of this magnitude that has hit New Orleans directly.

“We did the things that we thought were best based upon the information we had. Sure there were lots of buses out there. But, guess what. You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, bearing down on New Orleans.”

About 60 percent of the city has evacuated for prior storms, but about 80 percent got out this time, Nagin said.

“We were in a position of trying to encourage as many people as possible to leave because we weren’t comfortable that we had the resources to move them out of the city,” he said. “We encouraged people to buddy up, churches to take senior citizens and move them to safety, and a lot of them did. And then we would deal with the remaining people that couldn’t or wouldn’t leave and try and get them to higher ground until safety came.”
more...
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09_12.html#078937

A. Most bus drivers evacuated.
B. 80% of population or (400,000 people)evacuated form the city, which is a record percentage for a major American city.
C. Public transist buses were also used to evacuate citizens.
D. Nagin had buses and police go up and down street w/ sirens and public address systems, urging people who couldn't leave the city to get a bus ride to the Superdome, which about 35,000+ did.
E. No AC or bathrooms on buses. Several old people died on the schoolbuses while being evacuated because the buses were stuck in traffic and heat.
F. Bus drivers made one-way trips. In other words, the drivers were not allowed to return to NO w/ an empty bus.
G. There was no place to take people in buses. The day before the storm's landfall, there were no available hotel rooms as far north as Shreveport.
H. Amtrack stopped running trains out of the city when there was still time to get people out by train (Saturday night). Greyhound also shut down service Saturday night.
I. The airport shut down early when there was still time to get people out by private planes or giant troop carrier planes or airliners.

I'll look for more links. Here's a timelink w/ links to each stage of the disaster:
http://www.katrinatimeline.org/

Local online news site nola.com (Times-Picayune newspaper) Katrina stories in this part of the site in order by date.:
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/weather/?storylist=hurricane

[EVDebs]

5. Who was going to drive those buses ? National Guard ?

FEMA started contracting for out of state buses from as far away as Cincinnati OH and Hickory NC. I also saw charter buses from AL and TN in the picture that Newsweek ran in its hurricane edition p. 44-45, with school buses on the opposite side of the highway. Obviously someone drove those school buses in some kind of state/local rescue operation. The FEMA busing came DAYS too late.

[never cry wolf]

6. A couple of other points

Nagin didn't have control of the school busses, they are school board property. The busses he had control of, the city public transportation busses, he used to execute the city's part of the plan which was to get people that didn't evacuate to temporary shelters hwere they would ride out the storm and be relieved by the state and feds in a couple of days. These busses ran all day sunday for free.

One other point is that Nagin did not have the authority to transport people from NOLA to outside of his jurisdiction.

[CottonBear]

7. Excellent points.

Faux News' Brit Hume kept showing the school bus photo to Senators Landrieu and Vitter yesterday on his Faux News Sunday Show while railing about Nagin and how bad Nagi is. Landrieu (in studio) looked like she might strangle him and smother his disgusting, smarmy face. Vitter looked pissed too. Hume wanted to blame Nagin for everything while giving absolutely NO FACTS about Nagin's actions, the school board, the use of the city buses, the evacuation or the actual date and place that the photo was taken.

The senators refused to take the Faux News bait and blame Nagin for not using buses over which he no control and for which there were no drivers.

[never cry wolf]

8. Also, after Katrina hit

Neighboring communities had armed guards to keep NOLA residents OUT. Even if the busses could run after the fact they would have been turned away at gunpoint.

[CottonBear]

10. Another timeline link from Talking Points Memo:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/katrina-timeline.php