So why didn't Nagin use the school buses?

Has he been asked that question? How did he answer?

Nowhere to evac to.

Read the accounts of the evacuation. He used them Some went unused, but there were MANY that WERE USED.

And in fact, the 80% evacuation rate that was experienced was far more than had ever been predicted. The evacuation was a monumental success.

due to being on the buses stuck in the traffic.

I remember hearing on the news that three elderly people who had been put on school buses for evacuation had died on the bu due to dehydration (intense heat, no AC, no water, stuck in traffic).

I have no idea why this isn't obvious to everyone.

80% of a major city evacuated is basically unheard of.

There was an evacuation plan approved by the FEMA. He followed this evacuation plan.

I am compiling a sequence of events and failures

and allowed the Superdome to be used has a shelter. Before Sunday the Red Cross had never certified any building inside of New Orleans to be used for a shelter because they felt that none of the buildings, including the Superdome would be safe enough.

...can you imagine people volunteering to hop on a regular schoolbus to destination unknown for time unknown when they are sitting in their homes, in relative comfort?

They all left

There are many threads on that here, but a few points.

There were no drivers.

They only could have gotten out 13,000 people out of the 80,000 stranded.

City buses were used to evacuate some people.

Maybe he did make an error in judgement in not deploying the buses, but in the grand scheme of things and the magnitude of this tragedy, the bulk of the blame belongs with the feds.

Drivers, buses, gas a safe location....All these things require a budget. What happens if the money simply wasn't there for this? Did they expect Nagin to spend this out of his own pocket?

"3 Die While Fleeing Storm

An official with the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner's Office said three residents of a New Orleans nursing home fleeing Hurricane Katrina aboard a school bus died Sunday during an evacuation to a Baton Rouge church.

The names, ages and sexes of the dead were not available.

Don Moreau, chief of operations, said the coroner's office responded to a call from emergency medical technicians to a Baptist church, which was the destination for the bus of nursing home patients. Once there, Moreau said one person was dead inside the church and another was found dead inside the bus.

He said the person in the bus appeared to have been dead for some time.

Moreau said the others on the bus, 21 people, were transported to Earl K. Long Hospital, where a third nursing home resident later died.

The coroner's office has not determined a cause of death for any of the three. However, Moreau said many people on the bus were suffering from dehydration.

It is not known how long the bus was on the road, but many other travelers reported drive times from the New Orleans area to Baton Rouge of several hours."

http://www.wdsu.com/news/4909184/detail.html

School buses are not air conditioned, and they were on the road for hours in very high temperatures. I remember personally watching a CNN reporter who was on the road ALL DAY trying to get from New Orleans to Biloxi.

Also note this section:

"Hotels are exempt from the New Orleans evacuation order. Acknowledging that large numbers of people -- many of them stranded tourists -- would be unable to leave, the city also set up 10 places of last resort for people to go, including the 77,000-seat Louisiana Superdome.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Interstate 10 leading away from the city was choked with traffic. She urged motorists to find alternative routes out of the city.

Blanco said President George W. Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

The president has already declared states of emergency in Louisiana and Mississippi to accelerate the emergency response to the storm. He joined the Federal Emergency Management Agency in urging everyone to obey evacuation orders.

Officials in Washington are sending water, food and other supplies to staging centers in the Southeast. FEMA is coordinating efforts by other federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and the Transportation and Energy departments."

Remember that with Contraflow, traffic could only go out. No one could return. So evacuation was one trip only for an evacuation vehicle.

they could not return to drive another bus. That driver was in effect out of service even if there were more buses to use.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4675831

And this one:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4669887

(1) during the evacuation, Hurricane Katrina was an Incident of National Significance, so the Department of Homeland Security had the "primary responsibility" for response efforts.

(2) School buses were used to evacute. Just not all of them.

(3) There were over 100,000 without transportation, I recall. The buses would only be able to transport 13,000. That leaves 73,000 who still had to go to 'refuges of last resort.'

The focus must be kept on the National Response Plan as you have stated because FEMA became responsible on the 28th of August, immediately after the President signed the Proclamation declaring Louisiana a disaster area. I am posting the link to your thread here because it is the ANSWER to all these questions and the KEY to it all, imo:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4668155

Not enough people to drive busses...

Busses were staged at some mall and sat for nearly two days before drivers were found.

It was chaos.

The real tragedy was FEMA not being there with emergency food and water and the resources to deliver it.

A large part of the plan all along was for people in N.O. without transportation to shelter in the Superdome. This was successful; however, the followup to the idea of sheltering in place was that after the storm, if necessary, outside relief would come and care for/remove the victims. These outside agencies failed.

There was never anything wrong with using the Dome, and no one in N.O. planned to leave people in the Dome for days w/o food, water, and security. Why that happened is a question for FEMA...

... perhaps National Guardsman could have been driving those buses and evacuating people instead of getting blown to bits driving insufficiently armored vehicles in Iraq.

A thread from earlier this morning:
"Proof - NAGIN did USE the SCHOOL BUSES to take people out
Edited on Wed Sep-07-05 04:06 AM by DoYouEverWonder

at least until 3 people died on one probably because of being stuck in traffic and the HEAT for so long.

Traffic was backed up for hours with people trying to leave NO. Keep in mind school buses have no AC or bathrooms. Imagine beginning stuck with a bus full of people and no where to go to the bathroom.

After this is appears that Nagin stopped using the buses and begged FEMA to send Greyhound type buses instead to take people out.

Once again, it looks like Nagin did everything humanly possible while FEMA was too worried about maintaining a good image to bother saving lives.



UPDATED: 9:26 am CDT August 29, 2005

3 Die While Fleeing Storm

An official with the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner's Office said three residents of a New Orleans nursing home fleeing Hurricane Katrina aboard a school bus died Sunday during an evacuation to a Baton Rouge church.

The names, ages and sexes of the dead were not available.

Don Moreau, chief of operations, said the coroner's office responded to a call from emergency medical technicians to a Baptist church, which was the destination for the bus of nursing home patients. Once there, Moreau said one person was dead inside the church and another was found dead inside the bus.

He said the person in the bus appeared to have been dead for some time.

http://www.wdsu.com/news/4909184/detail.html