I disagree with the over-used prattle about the school buses. As late as Sunday night, we didn't know whether the hurricane was going to drift east and hit Slidell, Pearl River, and other places in Mississippi or drift west and hit New Orleans directly and possibly Baton Rouge. If the city had used those buses to send all of those people to Baton Rouge, more of those people might have been killed by a direct hit on wherever they were staying. Furthermore, many of those people would have arrived in Baton Rouge and immediately begun looting, raping, and killing. While Baton Rouge was not hit this time, most people in the are had to prepare for very high winds and possible heavy rains. Many of these people had relatives from New Orleans seeking shelter in their houses. Things in Baton Rouge and the surrounding area were confused enough on the weekend before Katrina, and the addition of 10,000 looters would not have helped the situation. The notion that the interstates were sitting empty on Sunday just wating for the city to bus 10,000 people to points north and west is also ridiculous. I live just southeast of Baton Rouge, and I watched cars crawling along I-10 for two days. There were a few slack periods, but traffic was heavy all weekend.
It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback anything, and I agree that we should look for ways to improve any performance. However, much of the carping from the right is as wrong and as stupid as the carping from the left. A category 4 hurricane hitting a metropolitan area of over a million people is going to have a huge negative impact regardless of who's in charge. People who think they have a plan for everything are the people we should least trust with power.
Bill
Yeah..., who the hell pays any attention to their disaster plans anyway!
By that logic, why issue any evacuation orders at all? The whole idea of an evacuation is to evacuate people beyond the zone where the hurricane has the potential to hit. So if Baton Rouge was potentially in the path, you don't evacuate people to Baton Rouge. People are going to be evacuating from Baton Rouge if that's the case. The idea is to get them away from where the storm's liable to hit at all. It's not like schoolbuses only have a short range. They can go anywhere any other vehicle can go.
Bottom line: School buses were part of the evacuation plan for a hurricane, which the locals completely dropped the ball on.