How many police and school buses did that mayor have at his disposal before the storm hit? He had a good 48 hours notice of coming disaster and sat on his hands. Now he blames everyone but himself.
Good Lord! How much easier is it to load a school bus, 65 humans at a time, than to load a Sea Hawk, eight (if that) people at a time?
I don't think you'd quite get 65 per trip (more like 48), but with a couple hundred buses, that's in the neighborhood of 10,000 you could've pulled out of New Orleans.
He had at least 650 local buses which could have been used in an evacuation. Provisions for this would have to been made in adavance and in the city's evacuation plan, of course. The point is, these resources were left unused.
I estimate the total number of school buses in Orleans county to be at least 325 and the number of city buses to be about the same. The buses could not only have been used to remove thousands from the city before the storm, but they obviously could have already been used to make several subsequent trips to and from the downtown core for more evacuations.
.................
http://www.ersys.com/usa/22/2255000/ptranbus.htm
333 public transit buses
1996-1998 data
....................
http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/scs/661.html
324 Orleans Parish school buses
02-03 data
Have you all seen the photo of the school buses just standing in water?
Why weren't these buses used to get people out over the weekend?
Here's a link to the photo (not posting photo so it won't slow the thread down):
http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20050901/capt.flpc21109012015.hurricane_katrina_flpc211.jpg?x=380&y=235&sig=NbUvEfVIaferkxoZTiys0Q--
