Webster buses turned away with no evacuees

Minden Press-Herald ^ | 9/6-2005 | Kristi Richie

[2nd amendment mama]

Kristi Richie
Press-Herald Staff

The nine school buses Webster Parish sent to New Orleans Friday to assist with evacuation efforts returned only with their drivers.

The buses stopped at a checkpoint in LaPlace and sat for several hours.

“Somebody came and told them they didn’t have a mission for them, so we loaded up and came home,” Webster Parish Schools Superintendent Butch Williams said.

Webster wasn’t the only group of buses turned away, though. Several hundred school buses, which were sent by order of Gov. Kathleen Blanco, were also turned away with no evacuees — possibly because the buses are not air conditioned and have no bathrooms, and officials did not know how far the buses would have to travel with evacuees.

“We have no idea what happened or went on. It wasn’t the evacuees that didn’t want to get on — I don’t really know what it was,” Williams said. “We’re pretty upset. It took a long time to get down there, and they had to sit there so long.”

The order from the governor was handed down Thursday night, stating all school superintendents are to provide an inventory of all buses and drivers and they are to be made available “to be used as necessary for the mass evacuation of Hurricane Katrina evacuees...”

First Baptist Church also took two buses to South Louisiana and were turned away.

Drivers Bob Chandler and Tommy Davis were to take the two air conditioned buses to just outside the French Quarter and evacuate 70 residents and 10 staff members of Maison Hospital.

However, the buses made it only as far as Baton Rouge before being turned around.

The Webster Parish Sheriff’s Office did utilize two parish school buses to transport prisoners to high ground.

Ten deputies were sent to assist and arrived just after daylight Thursday morning. One bus took prisoners to Monroe, and the second load was taken to Union Parish.

[Ciexyz]

What the eff?

[gondramB]

"Gee should I stay in NO with no food or water and live in water toxic enough to give me a chemical burn, or, should I take the chance I may have to take a dump in a roadside ditch? On top of which, my MRE's were cold. These people are indeed stuck on stupid IMO."
\
Not to mention they didn't let the people decide - they just turned the busses around. What about that neighborhood where they have pulled 160 people out of the water yesterday - you don't think those people would like to go somewhere safe, even if they can go to the bathroom without the bus stopping?

I hope to God that the governor of Louisiana never holds another important job unless it's trustee at a women's prison.

[Hildy]

OOPS...Sorry...so, what does a President of a Parish do? Is he like the Mayor?

[GovernmentShrinker]

possibly because the buses are not air conditioned and have no bathrooms

Oh, okay. Now I get why those 400+ school and city transit buses that were left in parking lots to be flooded, couldn't be used to transport 10s of thousands of people out of harm's way. Naturally, it would be impossible to open the windows and the wind of a 60+ mph highway drive do the trick, and stop periodically to let people off to answer nature's call in the roadside bushes. Might as well die if the alternative is a 4 our ride on a non-air conditioned bus with no bathroom. < /sarc>

[Kryptonite]

That idiot NOLA Mayor responded to a question about using schopol busses to evacuate with this: "School busses. Where are the Greyhounds?"

As if school busses weren't good enough to get people out of the cesspool.

[Centurion2000]

possibly because the buses are not air conditioned and have no bathrooms, and officials did not know how far the buses would have to travel with evacuees.

I suppose that refugees would just rather stand around in subtropical heat with no climate controls in hip deep water. Who are the idiots running this train wreck ?

[rebel_yell2]

Possibly = Possibly Not.

Pure speculation by an obviously biased reporter. Short of facts, long on biased speculation.

[IamConservative]

I hope to God that the governor of Louisiana never holds another important job unless it's trustee at a women's prison.

She may be up for a promotion to inmate when this all gets sorted out!

[SengirV]

Reading is fundamental =)

[SengirV]

Ahh, that's an update. Last I heard, they were coming back with a couple of college students who needed a lift back to DC, and some folks were going to be flown to DC from some other locale.

[Kozak]

Words fail me. Because the buses didn't have air conditioning and bathrooms, they weren't used to get people out of buildings with no air conditioning and bathrooms.

But LOTS of running water...

[Cboldt]

Who was responsible for turning these buses away?

Had to be FEMA - the governor can do no wrong.

[Cboldt]

The buses were turned away Friday, says the article, and one can reasonably infer that his means Friday, Sept 2nd.

[Cboldt]

Unbelievably, FEMA prefvented the Red Cross from entering NO

I've read a few of your posts, and IIRC, had a dialogue on one matter (I forget which). My impression of your reporting is that is tends to misprepresent facts.

Per the Red Cross ...

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?
* Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

http://www.redcross.org/faq/0,1096,0_682_4524,00.html

The National Guard is not FEMA, and as the Red Cross notes, the National Guard that denied them entry after the hurrican was under the control of local (i.e., Louisinan State) authorities.

[2nd amendment mama]

Thank you for finding that. I knew I'd seen it someplace but haven't had the time to go looking for it today. :)

[2nd amendment mama]

ROTFLMAO

[DallasMike]

Fellow Freepers:

At the suggestion of writer Michelle Malkin last Friday, I have cobbled together a blogsite called Texas Clearinghouse for Katrina Aid to serve as a clearinghouse for refugee efforts in Texas.

Texas is getting more refugees than any other state -- that's fine, we'll take them all -- but we need help providing them with food, clothing, and shelter.

If you are a refugee, you can information that will help you find relief. If you want to donate or volunteer, you can find someone who needs you.

Right now the site mostly covers Houston and Dallas but I will add various churches, schools, and other charities in San Antonio and Ft. Worth tonight. My wife is down at Reunion Arena in Dallas as we speak handing out care packages and otherwise ministering to the refugees as a representative of her employer.

There are a lot of churches and other organizations in Texas that need help in dealing with the problem and I would be most appreciative if you would get the word out.

Many thanks,

Michael McCullough

Stingray blogsite

[Katya]

Actually I heard a busdriver interviewed who stated he was sitting with a bunch of other busdrivers about 20 minutes north of the city earlier in the week, but were told not to go in until they had armed guards for each bus....he also stated this had come from the governor. So they just sat.

[VeniVidiVici]

THE PLAN (if you want to call it that)

---

N.O. wants no one left behind

Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult

Sunday, July 24, 2005
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer

City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own.

In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation.

"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you.

"But we don't have the transportation."

Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane.

Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action.

"The primary message is that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said.

In addition to the plea from Nagin, Thomas and Wilkins, video exhortations to make evacuation plans come from representatives of State Police and the National Weather Service, and from local officials such as Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, and State Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, said Allan Katz, whose advertising company is coordinating officials' scripts and doing the recording.

The speakers explain what to bring and what to leave behind. They advise viewers to bring personal medicines and critical legal documents, and tell them how to create a family communication plan. Even a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals weighs in with a message on how to make the best arrangements for pets left behind.

Production likely will continue through August. Officials want to get the DVDs into the hands of pastors and community leaders as hurricane season reaches its height in September, Katz said.


Fleeing the storm


Believing that the low-lying city is too dangerous a place to shelter refugees, the Red Cross positioned its storm shelters on higher ground north of Interstate 10 several years ago. It dropped plans to care for storm victims in schools or other institutions in town.

Truehill, Wilkins and others said emergency preparedness officials still plan to deploy some Regional Transit Authority buses, school buses and perhaps even Amtrak trains to move some people before a storm.

An RTA emergency plan dedicates 64 buses and 10 lift vans to move people somewhere; whether that means out of town or to local shelters of last resort would depend on emergency planners' decision at that moment, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said.

But even the larger buses hold only about 60 people each, a rescue capacity that is dwarfed by the unmet need.

In an interview at the opening of this year's hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched.

"It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," he said in a interview in late May.


A helping hand


In the absence of public transportation resources, Total Community Action and the Red Cross have been developing a private initiative called Operation Brother's Keeper that, fully formed, would enlist churches in a vast, decentralized effort to make space for the poor and the infirm in church members' cars when they evacuate.

However, the program is only in the first year of a three-year experiment and involves only four local churches so far.

The Red Cross and Total Community Action are trying to invent a program that would show churches how to inventory their members, match those with space in their cars with those needing a ride, and put all the information in a useful framework, Wilkins said.

But the complexities so far are daunting, she said.

The inventories go only at the pace of the volunteers doing them. Where churches recruit partner churches out of the storm area to shelter them, volunteers in both places need to be trained in running shelters, she said.

People also have to think carefully about what makes good evacuation matches. Wilkins said that when ride arrangements are made, the volunteers must be sure to tell their passengers where their planned destination is if they are evacuated.

Moreover, although the Archdiocese of New Orleans has endorsed the project in principle, it doesn't want its 142 parishes to participate until insurance problems have been solved with new legislation that reduces liability risks, Wilkins said.

At the end of three years, organizers of Operation Brother's Keeper hope to have trained 90 congregations how to develop evacuation plans for their own members.


The church connection


Meanwhile, some churches appear to have moved on their own to create evacuation plans that assist members without cars.

Since the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004, Mormon churches have begun matching members who have empty seats in cars with those needing seats, said Scott Conlin, president of the church's local stake. Eleven local congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints share a common evacuation plan, and many church members have three-day emergency kits packed and ready to go, he said.

Mormon churches in Jackson, Miss., Hattiesburg, Miss., and Alexandria, La., have arranged to receive evacuees. The denomination also maintains a toll-free telephone number that functions as a central information drop, where members on the road can leave information about their whereabouts that church leaders can pick up and relay as necessary, Conlin said.

. . . . . . .

[No Longer Free State]

Wasn't the bulk of the evacuation complete by Friday? They probably had more buses than they could afford to keep refueled by Friday.