Good post.
Much has been made of the parked school buses and how filling them with people could have saved at least a few lives (even if the drivers had to be paid overtime, etc.).
In this day and age, though, you absolutely cannot rely on the government - whether it's the city, the school district, or FEMA - to look after your best interests. By the time they get around to acting, it could be too late.
As this article points out, priorities for New Orleans were to construct hugely expensive rail systems that didn't really go anywhere so tourists could have a good time. (Hey, it's been a few years since I was in Norlins, and I had a good time even without riding a trolley down canal street - as I think everybody did.) Little thought was given to spending a few million on basic transportation, or at least developing an alternative for those who don't have cars when an emergency arises.
The lessons of New Orleans and Katrina are going to be a tough sell in much of the country, unfortunately. The anti-automobile movement (disguised as "smart growth" and other easier-to-swallow covers) is too well entrenched in city planning departments and too well funded by (no surprise here) non-profit organizations and even the EPA. Even a disaster like this will not change their way of thinking. They would prefer to point fingers of blame rather than consider the possibility that their goals are dangerous to society.
Good post.
New Orleans is an advertisement for owing a private automobile and a damning critique of public transportation.
Unfortunately this situation uncovers (among many other social and governmental shortcomings), the perils of dependency on public transportation in today's world, particularly in an emergency..
Well now BS.
We have seen the masses of busses just sitting there. The poor may not have had "automobility" but they sure had one hell of a lot of busses just sitting there and doing nothing, thanks to the unmatched stupidty of Mayor Numnut Nagin.
You RATs. You are so predicable.
The city leaders had at least two full days to use these hundreds of buses to evac the poor, exactly as their own emergency management plan called for.
Here's the southeast Louisiana evac plan supplement, most recently revised in 2000. Go to page 13, read paragraph 5. It states:
5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.
What does FEMA have to do with evacuation PRIOR to a hurricane?
Number of Deaths Caused by Hurricanes in the U.S.
1900-1919 10,000
1920-1939 3,751
1940-1959 1,119
1960-1979 453
1980-1999 57
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This is far more related to weather forecasting advances. Cars get you out of danger, but don't help at all if the storm hits without warning.
It doesn't bear thinking what will happen when a strong earthquake hits this country. Except that someone has to.
Thanks for pointing out the role of "smart growth" in the deaths of so many people.
In California, the Sacramento Region Blueprint is creating "smart growth" chaos with significant funding from the Department of Transportation. If you see "traffic calming", international style road markings for crosswalks and such and "smart growth" or "transportation-oriented" developments, you can bet the good old DOT is paying for a lot of it.
More reason now than ever to trim the federal government and evict the people hating Agenda 21 sustainable development bureaucrats that are disabling America.
If you could only fit wheels to a big-screen TV.
I'm not quite convinced yet.
So now not only can I blame tree huggers for the price I'm paying for gas in my little town but I can dump a couple dozen truckloads of them dead bodies that are swellin up down there in the Big Easy right on their front porch.
One things for sure, if you didn't have a car of your own, you sure weren't going to get out of New Orleans. How could you with over 400 buses sitting idle in their bus barns that the sorry excuse for a Mayor did not comandeer and load with poor people and drive them out, before he fled to safety himself.
It isn't Bush's job to call out City and School buses to evacuate people, it's the Mayors and the Governors. They are the beginning of the Chain of Command and they made no effort to implement the disater plan they both had to know was there. It was Bush who pleaded with them to even announce an evacuation and they waited until it was almost too late.
Not everyone can own a car, least of all the poor. Still, if they can drive a car, they can handle a bus, a 17 year old youth did.
There is no excuse for the City and States failure here, no matter what kind of smokescreen they put up to make it look like Bush failed.
Had Bush just gone in and taken charge, they would be screaming today that he interfered in State Matters and is instituting a Nazi State.
That Governor and Mayor deserve no less than to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the very citizens they failed.
It's no coincidence that 9/11 happened in one of the most high density, and mass transit cities on earth.
Dispersal in low density areas, and working via the Internet, is a great way to live.
It is a good post. If you live in a death trap, depending on public transportation is quite risky. If you can't afford a car, living in a death trap is not one's best strategy. Move to Atlanta, move to Houston, move to Dallas, but move, away from the gulf, where mother nature is quite angry at the moment, and she is not finished with her anger. She will be back, again, and again.
Yeah, most got out decades before Katrina when they were consciously and knowingly subjected to a policy of ethnic cleansing by the Nazi left. This would also be a good time to remind people that at least 60,000 white people have been mass-murdered since the 60's by black criminals and, who knows, hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million have been mass-raped by black criminals while the editors of the New York participate in and sponsored those crimes by suppressing information about them.
Those who curse SUV and large Vans should try evacuating a family of 5 in a Toyota Prius, If you grease all your family members up you might fit, but forget about taking a bottle of water .
When cars are outlawed only outlaws will have cars...
Overall, a good article. However, I want to know precisely how it is that racism played any role whatsoever in this catastrophe.
Shouldn't that be "Lack of Intestinal Fortitude" or "Lack of Spinal Integrity?"