Is this true?

On another board, I see this RNC talking point-

"After President Bush's strong request Blanco issued mandatory evacuation of lower LA at 10 a.m. on Saturday. the storm hit New Orleans about 6 a.m. Monday. That means that those buses could have had as much as 40 hours to be used. Nagin's evacuation plan filed with LA EMA said if the buses had been used 41,000 citizens could have been evacuated in two trips each. If they had taken people 2 hours north (where there was only minimal damage and NO flooding) that means those buses could have made over 4 round trips each..."

I suspect the answer is simple....there weren't any drivers available to do this, but are the facts correct?

Also, anyone know Nagin's whereabouts through the hurricane? Again, I suspect that he sought temporary shelter away from the city....no one said you had to kill yourself to prove you were 'on the job".

and then launch into schpeil about Iraq for 20 minutes.

and NO thought they had escaped the brunt. Don't people do any research?

NO did withstand the hurricane. The problem came when the levee broke. The levee that they had begged to be updated. The citizens of NO understood the danger, many based their decisions on 40 years of experience and they were right. What was wrong was the failure of bush and company to do the right thing. I remember hearing on the news that places were flooded that had never been underwater before and places that always expected to be underwater were dry.

And now with the death of Renquist, our only hope is impeaching bush as soon as possible.

Rehnquest would be ashamed of him.

Let's hope that old man is still able to pull some strings... If you're there, Rehnqy -- please whisper some sanity into Bush's right ear.

The smear machine is going into full tilt bogey.

I think he was getting ready to give a speech in Ca. in front of men in uniform screened for his point of view. I may be wrong but I think the dikes went after the storm was gone. In other words they had time to get those people out if the NG had been ready to move in.

n/t

There were may be a couple hundred school busses (if that's what you mean) but the mayor had regular city busses leaving that weren't full. The people mostly had no where to go. The city had an evacuation plan, but once they left the city FEMA was in charge.

By nightfall you couldn't get out, traffic backed up 7 hrs. How can you make two trips? From articles I've read, not news but statistical predictions made back when Clinton was in, about 140,000 people would stay in the evacuation areas. 60 - 70 per bus is 2000 busses. When an evacuation occurs it's one-way you can't come back.

Louisiana is a state that does not force evacuations. Like FL it may be mandatory but you don't have to go. The city has no liability if you catch on fire and no one comes. It's at your own risk.

as Blanco sent the "formal request" they keep yapping about on 8/28.

why did Blanco deny the request to have FEMA assume jurisdiction a couple of days ago, late Friday night? Why did * even have to ask?

Doesn't her denial basically deny the validity of your assertion?

as I understand it, ended at the city limit. FEMA is supposed to be the entity that interlocks with the various jurisdictions.

He screamed and begged for help the whole time. Then they would tell him FEMA and help was on the way and two hours later he would be back yelling again because no help ever came. It was horrible to follow what was going on last Sunday. Now they are trying to blame him because he had the balls to tell the truth and he's a DEM. He did his best for his people.

Bush declared a State of Emergency BEFORE the storm on Sunday. At that point the response to the disaster was in the hands of the Federal Government. They failed miserably and now they are trying to blame everyone else for their failings.

Everyone failed in one way or another. Bush and his political hack appointees bear the greatest bulk of the blame, but there is a little bit of blame we can apportion to Nagin and Blanco.

The busses being there during the hurricane are not Nagin's fault unless Nagin acted completely independent from normal city protocol in an emergency like this. Nagin needed the drivers, needed the evacuees to arrive early enough for it to make a difference, and Nagin would have had to have a place to go, which is out of his jurisdiction.

But the roads out of NO were all two-way in all of the footage I have seen. Blanco or Nagin (whichever had the authority) should have ordered those highways one-way. Woulda coulda shoulda.

The REAL blame does lie with the feds, but we must be willing to accept what small amount of blame Democrats should bear both for the sake of the sanity of this country, and as an appeal to those that right now think that no one in the government will protect them from anything.

Nagin saved his city by telling it like it is, political suicide be damned. He got them the help they needed, and should be commended for it. The busses thing is very woulda shoulda coulda, which is a typical RW talking point.

I count about 220 buses in the Drudge photo. Let's project high and say he had 400 buses. The emergency plan, developed in coordination with the state and FEMA, should have called for the use of those buses to evacuate people. Let's say 50 people a bus, and say that could have gotten 20,000 people out. The plan should have called for a mustering point in the Lower 9th Ward, and it should have called for the use of the Louisiana National Guard to flush out, sort, and prioritize evacuees by age and health status. That plan didn't exist, and that is the joint responsibility of the city authorities, the state authorities, and FEMA. That would be the optimal use of those buses. But even if that optimal plan were in place, you obviously would have had the problems of sorting and prioritizing, and you still would have left 100,000 behind. That's the rub. Even accepting full blame for Nagin on the buses, the catastrophe would have still happened, and the response from FEMA would have still been as pathetic. Suppose the plan is to evacuate the hospitals. That could have been done with the 400 buses, although you'd have to then reduce the number of people evacuated significantly, since you'd also have to move medical equipment and personnel.

The answer, then, is: Yes, the mayor, together with the coordinating agencies at state and federal levels, should have composed a better evacuation plan. True. I accept that. It's obvious that those buses should have been deployed. BUT.

1) There would have been a significant number left behind even if those buses had been worked into an evacuation plan.
2) FEMA and DHS would have had to have been involved in the use of those buses, since the city would not have the logistical resources to muster, sort, and prioritize people without the NG (imagine the panic of being among 10,000 fighting for the 400th bus!)
3) Even with that reasonable criticism of local officials, the federal government does not escape its responsibility for what DID happen in terms of a slow response. Because something different could have happened if someone else had acted differently doesn't make you any less responsible for what DID happen. DHS and FEMA proved themselves to be worthless in an emergency situation; the President stumbled about in indifference for several days as a major security situation escalated beyond control, and the federal apparatus - which has sold itself as the preparedness apparatus - proved to be unable to prepare.

But let's delve further into the absurd notion that the evacuation could have been effected by these buses. Suppose 200,000 people remained in the city. At 50 people a bus, they would have only needed 4000 buses. Funny, I only see about 220 in that Drudge picture. You'd also need 4000 drivers. Suppose you could load 50 at a time. Loading, say, 1 person on a bus every 10 seconds (allow for faster and slower), and giving a ten minute interval between buses (now, you're moving people from their homes, maybe forever, so you can see how generous this calculation is), and assuming you could load 50 buses simultaneously at a uniform rate. Each load of 50 buses would take 8.3 minutes (that's for 2500 people). You would need 80 loads, so that's 80 X 8.3 plus 78 X 10 (78 intervals) = 1444 minutes, divided by 60 = 24 hours. It would take 24 hours, with everything running smoothly, and 50 buses loading at a time, and 4000 buses available, to load 200,000 people on to buses and move them out of the City of New Orleans. let's cut it down to 100,000 people, and say 2000 buses and 12 hours. This is assuming that you have everybody prepared and in one place and space for loading 50 buses, and lines that would allow 10 second per person loads, and no snags, difficulties, or conflicts. Let's even be reasonable and say that you can cut the number of buses by 25% through return trips. You've also gassed up your buses and encountered no traffic (!). You'd need 1500 buses making flawless round trips and a population loading on at 10 seconds a person. And it would then take 12 hours. This is, of course, an absurdly simplisistic scenario.

Would you agree that 15 minutes is a reasonable time to load 50 people on to a bus (pull in to pull out)? In my experience with buses, that sounds about right. And let's even assume that they could load 10 buses at a time, and that it would take only 10 minutes to get organized between loads. That's 400 buses, or 40 loads, with ten minutes between loads. If everything went smoothly, it would still take 16 hours to load 20,000 people on to buses. If such an evacuation started at noon Saturday, it would take until four am Sunday morning to get it done. And this is supposing everything goes smoothly.

It is possible, and should have been done. But let's not pretend that it would have been easy to accomplish with only city resources.

Any cretin knows that even this rosiest of scenarios is impossible on short notice, yet this is what the Drudgites would expect to have happened with those 250 (max) buses in their stupid little picture. Any fool knows that this is a laughable objection. Any child knows it. Not the Drudgites. Only reason and a 20 cent calculator is necessary, but the Drudgites lack the first, and - from all appearances - the ability to use the second.

Those are your answers. Go forth.

The truth is that the School Bus Claim mis a diversion from the major failing here: the inability to move quickly to save a major population once a disaster was imminent and escalating. No school bus picture buys the federal agencies - DHS and FEMA - out of that charge, and no school bus picture can wipe away the picture of the "security president" playing guitar and yucking it up while thousands of American citizens were drowning in their homes.

It serves the administration well, it seems, to create a drama around the New Orleans thing so it squarely shifts the discussion off the war, the price of gas, the economy... he's going to be running a bad boy administration from here on out...

I totally agree that the Freeper response is extremely flawed logic on a number of fronts-

(1) No one can predict the path of a hurricane that many hours in advance of its actual path. You obviously can't evacuate the entire Gulf Coast 72 hours before landfal...the Freeps would be the first people moaning about the waste of government money over reacting to the circumstances.

(2) The window of opportunity is relatively tight, the coordination of the evac and the logistics to do it while cars are choking the exits to get out work against a huge city with limited resources, particularly a city with limited financial resources like NO.

(3) Should there be a higher level of mass transportation available to cities like NO? Would the Freeps bemoan more government spending for "frivolous" expenditures? You bet they would. If they can't benefit directly, no one else should.

(4) Human nature and discipline that bus drivers would all be available to drive out and return to NO. Would Freeps be brave enough to return? Obviously not...but they'd expect NO bus drivers to do this. And they have their own families to worry about...

(5) If anything, Katrina shows the fuility of using bus evacuation as a primary plan. Better shelters, equipped to withstand Cat 5 hurricanes would seem to be a more practical longterm alternative.

The real issues is the flood control and post storm performance of the federal government. They failed miserably on both counts.

First, I think the mandatory evacuation order came Sunday morning, not Saturday. That severely limits the time. High winds picked up Sunday night.

Second, I don't think Blanco mobilized the LA National Guard. They could have driven the buses. Organizing the evacuation would have required some pre-planning; there's little evidence of any, but it's not like all the evidence has been presented. It would have been a bear, in the short time frame.

Third, I'm not sure that they had authority to commandeer the buses. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. Some accommodation surely could have been worked out with the school district, or whoever owned the buses. However, Nagin demanded commercial buses so that people could pee and have water for those 2-4 hours they'd be on the road; the Superdome was judged a superior option to using school buses. Monday at 4 pm, it looked like a good judgment; Tuesday at 4 pm, it looked like a sucky judgment.

People state that the evacuees would have had no place to go; the state's evacuation plan should have provided for that, that's why they had a state evacuation plan. Perhaps it did; perhaps it didn't.

Others insist that nearly half the city couldn't evacuate. Those numbers seem wildly inflated and self-serving.

Others imply that if you can't evacuate everybody, there's no good in evacuating some. This is ridiculous, and bears no further comment.

or not. It's difficult to say what the case was, but this article sheds some light on the matter:

http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWL082805catastrophe.f4dd3f.html




And it appears they did try to do what their emergency plan called for, they sought temporary shelter:

Here's an excerpted portion of the LA plan:
http://www.cityofno.com/SystemModules/PrintPage.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26



When a Cat 5 hurricane is about to wipe through and destroy everything in its path, a bus driving people around the city, when there were already traffic jams of people evacuating--the ones who did have cars, that is--that isn't going to take anyone out of danger, unless it was to get people to the Superdome and other designated shelters.

Also, if you haven't read this article here, you should - it's pretty damning all around, and gives great pause to think:

posted here:
MUST READ from Hurricane Guru Jeff Masters
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x153465
blitzen (597 posts) Mon Sep-05-05 03:52 AM
Original message

drivers.

a lot of this muddying of the waters re: what has gone down.

BOTTOM LINE: details/ schmetails: THERE IS ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO CONVICT THIS ADMINISTRATION W/ CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN IRAQ AND IN NOLA.