Looking for a counter argument: Nagin and Buses

"WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, AND TAKE People out OF THE CITY MAYOR?"

Any counter arguments?.

getting their own families to safety.

Too bad they were in Iraq and the federal government kept making promises of incoming manpower that's still, apparently, incoming.

. . . as soon as I issued the order, some pud from Homeland Security countermanded it, and asserted federal jurisdiction. Federal jurisdiction to sit around with their fingers up."

many, many threads answering this. It is the same OLD meme from the right wing trying, with pathetic desperation, to save their guy's ass, it isn't going to work.

I guess we can expect this to come up again and again because it all they have left to smear, sad really.

and Bush apparently didn't. Homeland Security was supposed to provide the assistance he begged for to help the people of NO leave. They wouldn't even return his calls. Hard to ask for help when no one will answer the phone.

The federal government is to blame for the slow response.

The local authoraties SHOULD have been better prepared, but the government should ave helped them prepare. It would be a overwhelming task o evacuate a city this large. The mayor could not plan such a task on his own. But by God if I were mayor I would have done something more than saying: "I urge everyone to evacuate."

...F-off, and go on about your business.

too much to do, not enough people to do it. That's why the feds are SUPPOSED to become involved to assist in major evacuations like this.

In fact, it's written into the FEMA regs. They just didn't follow them.

400 buses at 50 people a bus. Say that you can load a bus in 15 minutes, that you can load 10 buses simultaneously, and that it would take 10 minutes to get organized between loads. At that rate, it would take 16 hours to load 20,000 people. Suppose you can load 20 buses simultaneously. It would take 8 hours to load 20,000 people. And that's with everything running like clockwork.

Now, remember, people've already been mustered, they've already been prioritized by age and health status, and everything is going absolutely smoothly. Never mind that you'd have to drastically reduce the number of people per bus and the time per load if you're contemplating evacuating the hospitals, since such folks would require medical equipment and personnel. Let's ignore that factor.

Say it takes 3 hours for a bus to leave the pick up point, get to the drop off point, and return. This figure is extremely generous given the traffic leaving New Orleans beginning Saturday morning, but let's give it to them anyway. Let's assume a time frame of 30 hours, from 12 pm Saturday to 6 pm Sunday. Of your 400 buses, leaving and returning 20 at a clip, how many people could have been removed from New Orleans? 55,400 (180 buses wouldn't be able to make the third trip, given our timeframe. This would have been a great plan, however unrealistic the timeframes. You would have only left 50,000 or so behind. And this is the rosiest scenario.

Now, what kind of announcement would have caused people to assemble in this manner? What kind of resources would be necessary for such an organization? Could a municipal authority be expected to assemble such resources in a day? And has such an evacuation of a civilian population ever been accomplished in history?

Now, the key question. Given that none of this did happen, what is the earliest reasonable time for a federal response? Was that met?