Posted on 06/07/2015 5:43:05 PM PDT by BradtotheBone
While debating proposed cuts to Amtrak’s budget, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) argued that the government subsidized train system is necessary, especially during disasters.
“What is it - that we don’t support transportation infrastructure?” Brown said on the House floor Thursday. “When we had 9/11 – Amtrak was the only entity that was moving people. When we had Katrina – Amtrak. We had over 3,000 people to die because they couldn’t move around the area.”
According to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 1,833 people died in relation to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Amtrak had stopped service to New Orleans prior to Katrina reaching the area.
“We need a train that leaves New Orleans to go to Orlando and on down to Miami – that is the future,” Brown continued.
Amtrak offered passenger service on The Sunset Limited line from New Orleans to Orlando until 2005, when Katrina damaged the rail lines. The tracks have since been repaired but service to Orlando has not been restored.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
During an emergency, like Katrina, a mayor has the power to make any vehicle a public transport. He would only have to compensate whomever owns the vehicle for their inconvenience.
That is my understanding of mayoral powers during an emergency.
They had drivers ecvery day during the school year for most if not all of those buses. Is that the excuse they will use, no one with a CDL.
Of course the train will have to stop every 30 miles so people in those towns arent denied their rights.
But it will be a high speed train.
“However the mayor did take advantage of the week long warning to move his family out of New Orleans into an up scale condo in Dallas.”
Where did you get the idea that anyone had a week long warning about Katrina?
A week prior to Katrina, what would become a hurricane was Tropical Depression Twelve out in the Atlantic.
Of course they could have had the drivers stop every 45 minutes at a McDonald's to let people take a restroom break if needed.
As I recall, they had known for at least three days that Katrina was going to be very, very bad.
In that time, using school buses and any Greyhound buses in the area, they could have moved at least three hundred thousand residents in an orderly fashion.
The city officials simply were beyond simple incompetence.
Those buses didn’t roll because of the unions.
That was because the nitwit in charge wouldn't let them use the hundreds of school buses that were stashed all over the place.
The war of 1812 was largely about access to the interior of the continent. New Orleans and Detroit were the lines in the sand.
FEMA Prison Trains?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrarmdexeV0
(Yep, I know they are being used for automobile transport. Or at least that’s the official story)
Yes, the city leaders were incompetent.
Three days before Katrina hit and the levees failed, Katrina was a small storm in the Gulf with a cone of probability reaching from Texas to the
SW coast of Florida.
And the bottom line is that those people who did not evacuate, did not want to evacuate.
And New Orleans was already established and without control of New Orleans, one could not control the Mississippi and thus could not control the continent.
Trains are, in most cases, a 19th Century solution to 21st Century problem.
OUCH!
I felt your pain for a few years. I got shoved into Cynthia “Jihad” McKinney’s district for a while in the early 2000s, which is now Hank “Guam is gonna tip!” Johnson’s district. They pick some real winners in the GA 4th.
Thankfully, we were placed back where we belong, in the GA 6th, which is Newt’s old district (yes, I voted for Newt back in the day), now held by Dr. Tom Price.
Hey, if you want to talk infrastructure and Katrina then let us talk about school buses....
If she had actually studied in high school, she would not have to make stuff like this up.
Yep.
And I know someone who evacuated New Orleans on the Friday before the storm on Sunday (to Houston).
As there was getting to be more certainty of hitting New Orleans, some still adamantly refused to leave. Even their friends didn't know for several days if they'd survived.
"In a press conference at roughly (Sun Aug 28) 10:00 AM CDT, Nagin declared that 'a mandatory evacuation order is hereby called for all of the parish of Orleans.'"
yep, but they bussed them out later and they are still where they got sent, a lot of them
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