Glad you posted the pic and link to the accompanying article. I'd been wondering about the efficacy of evacuation by bus...btw, the best figures I could find were out of date and indicated only 400 City buses in the fleet...

I wonder if the 550 was a total figure, or the number of buses operational (with fuel to travel, say, 150 miles or so). I did a rough count of the school buses in the pic--I say about 200--and since it's cropped, there are presumably more.

Nagin said he didn't control the school buses. Don't know about Orleans, but I think in most parishes the buses are owned by the drivers themselves. Also, how many school buses were mechanically sound? And, as you point out in your post, there are logistics like getting drivers, establishing stops, determining drop off points, and so on.

Finally, IF by some miracle NOLA had been spared, that would make subsequent mandatory evacuations even MORE difficult...although, sadly, that's no longer a point of discussion...

Posted by: Michael at September 13, 2005 03:43 PM

So does this plan that wasn't implemented mean that bus drivers were intended to be first responders (or pre-responders) of sorts? Sounds like a hard sell to a guy who's trying to evacuate his own family.

It's a shame that this picture has become so powerful. It is such a loaded image that immediately produces a kneejerk reaction in people ("Why didn't they use the buses?") to the point that they are unable to think much further beyond it to see the logistical nightmare that using the buses would entail.

It was shameful to see Tim Russert harrass Nagin on "Meet the Press," asking him why he didn't use the buses on FRIDAY. Gee, Tim, maybe because it wasn't a Cat 5 hurricane headed for New Orleans yet. What would Russert have asked Nagin had he done the bus thing on Friday and then Katrina hit an evacuee shelter in Houston? It's absolutely amazing how short the media's line of thought is when it comes to second-guessing. With all the hurricanes they've covered endlessly in recent years, you'd think they'd have a grasp on what goes on.

These posts are fantastic. Please keep it up.

Posted by: Murphy Jenkins at September 13, 2005 08:14 PM

Great work, as always, James.

However there's a misspelling of "Nagin" in the first paragraph which slipped through your edits. Also, do you still have the source who says Nagin was previously a (registered) Republican? I'll be surprised if that's true, because that would be the first I heard of it, and he's my mayor!

Posted by: oyster at September 13, 2005 09:08 PM

Hello Michael, and thanks for visiting Hobson's Choice.

I realized I had checked your weblog and forgot to link to it. No, no, really!

The apologists are vehemently and vituperatively repeating the lie that Gov. Blanco did not request a state of emergency, or did so improperly, and so federal assistance would have "violated states' rights." As JMM pointed out at Talking Points Memo (link added, above), this is categorically false. According to William Nicholson, author of Emergency Response and Emergency Management Law (03 Edition), the declaration of emergency by Gov. Blanco ought to have settled it (I'm quoting from Ira Glass, heard on "This American Life"). Here is the text of a talk given by Mr. Nicholson. Here is the August 27 statement (Whitehouse.gov) authorizing FEMA to administer aid relief, etc. Here's an article in that commie rag, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "Mr. Chertoff activated the National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina an ‘Incident of National Significance.’ The plan, which was rolled out to much fanfare in January, essentially enables Washington to move federal assets to the disaster without waiting for requests from state officials."

Regarding the buses: Hannity advertized the claim that there were 2,000 buses that the city government had left in parking lots about the area. This turns out to be wide of the mark. "The district owns 324 buses but 70 are broken down. The 31 buses will take the place of some of the broken buses, Alexander said." (September, 2003).

What about the 364 (?) buses of NORTA? Oddly, Hobbs (not related, I suspect, to Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679]) doesn't investigate any explanation for their non-deployment; instead, he adds an endless stream of outlandish and unsubstantiated additional claims. No explanatory narrative here, folks; Bill Hobbs reminds me of nothing so much as a movie I once watched that had been made in China in 1976, explaining that the evil urban bourgeoisie were busily struggling against the proletariat and their Liberator, Mao, to sabotage the Great Leap Forward. Except, at least the Maoist move (awful as it was) had a figleaf of narrative. Hobbs, et al, furnish none.

Back to NORTA's buses: here is the NO-TP article on their deployment, published last July. Quote:

New Orleans has plans to deploy scores of buses from the Regional Transit Authority to evacuate people without transportation if Hurricane Dennis threatens the city, City Hall said on Thursday.

Such an effort would be both unprecedented and, apparently, far short of the city's needs.

At the same time, it appears emergency planners' efforts to establish church-led private transportation networks have fallen flat.

Surveys of the city's largest churches and of the Archdiocese of New Orleans indicated Thursday that most have no plans to gather church members or others and move them out of town in church vans or buses.

But the Archdiocese of New Orleans said it would evacuate the residents of its nursing homes and other health facilities.

Emergency planners may announce today whether they will trigger the RTA evacuation. That will depend on the course and location of Dennis, said Tami Frazier, spokeswoman for Mayor Ray Nagin.

[...]

Even if the entire fleet was used, the buses would carry only about 22,000 people out of the city -- far short of the 134,000 people estimated to be without cars in a recent University of New Orleans study.

Again, the universal problem: if it's a tropical storm of C-1, C-2, or even C-3, you are NOT going to attempt an evacuation of the elderly and the extremely sick to makeshift centers, thereby exposing them to the risk of dying of exposure or lack of administered health care. You are going to leave the NORTA buses under NORTA authority and tell 'em to sit tight in case Tropical Storm Katrina either upgrades to a hurricane (which it did on the 25th) or wallops NO directly.

ADDED: Hey, Oyster, great to see you! Glad to see you're running on both valves. Here's the link for Mayor Nagin.

Posted by: James R MacLean at September 13, 2005 10:10 PM

These posts are fantastic. Please keep it up

Thanks, Murphy, I'm deeply flattered to hear that. I've got another one in the pipeline about reconstruction. Then, some more about race and then I'm supposed to write about Hannah Arendt's book which i just finished. Then, I want to fit in a post about "main banks" (long story) and then hit the topic of imperialism by Communist regimes as a sequel to the series on private sector imperialism.

Posted by: James R MacLean at September 13, 2005 10:22 PM