Amtrak never offered any trains!

[KingFlorez]

Anderson Cooper repeated this lie on Nancy Grace and there is no evidence anyone from Amtrak ever contacted the Mayor's office offering trains to evacuate people from Hurricane Katrina.

[MindPilot]

1. There was an interview on my local AAR station with a man

who couldn't get out of NO so he spent a couple of days at the Superdome. The guy is a professor at a local university so money was not a problem. He said he couldn't get out because all public transportation--including Amtrak--was shut down for at least 48 hours prior to landfall.

[krkaufman]

4. It was my impression that public transit and Amtrak shutdown on Sat.

But it's just an impression, lacking evidence.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. What do they have there, 2 trains a day maybe? if that? 10 cars?

He makes it sound like they have the Long Island railroad or something.
What the fuck is the matter with that guy, has he been listening to Arlo Guthrie?

[AnnInLa]

3. thank you, thank you, thank you!

They will continue to try to make Nagin culpable, but we know who the inept person is in the Katrina tragedy; the same inept person who pretends to lead this country.

[Zynx]

5. I was on the City of New Orleans down there in 2003.

It would have taken a long time to get those people out on that route.

[Alizaryn]

6. Cooper asked the mayor during an interview

about it last night and the mayor said he did not know anything about it. The mayor asked who Amtrak has spoken to and Cooper said he had asked them that very question directly and was given a name (I don't remember it) which he then gave to the mayor who said good, now he had a way to get to the bottom of it.

[finecraft]

7. I saw that too. Supposedly it was the was the NO Emergency Mgmt. person

that Amtrak spoke with. I have been waiting to hear something about it on WWL all day, but nothing as of yet.

[mcscajun]

8. It's a He Said/He Said situation.

Katrina: What Happened When
http://www.factcheck.org/article348.html

Sunday, Aug. 28 2005 - 1 Day Prior

8:30 p.m. - An empty Amtrak train leaves New Orleans, with room for hundreds of potential evacuees. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way…The city declined," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. The train left New Orleans no passengers on board.

—Susan Glasser, " The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos ," The Washington Post, 11 Sep 2005.

Two weeks later, Nagin denies on NBC's Meet the Press that Amtrak offered their services. "Amtrak never contacted me to make that offer," the mayor tells host Tim Russert. "I have never gotten that call, Tim, and I would love to have had that call. But it never happened."

—" Interview with Mayor Nagin ," Meet the Press, NBC, 11 Sep 2005.

Of course...saying "We offered the city..." doesn't indicate WHO they may have contacted, so there's no way to trace it. So the assertion cannot be proved in Amtrak's favor.

Conversely, if anyone here had been the person who Amtrak did call, if indeed they called at all, would anyone want to 'fess up to declining such help? So Mayor Nagin could indeed be correct and right...or correct and wrong. We'll never know without a full investigation, top to bottom, back to front, every which way...and maybe not even then.

:(

[ellenfl]

9. i have read that, before the storm hit, amtrak did offer a

train that had some room but that the offer was turned down by the local office of fema. after that, all transportation was locked down.

ellen fl