Posted on 09/08/2005 7:09:32 AM PDT by BlackRain
School Buses
Claim: Photograph shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot.
Status: True.
(Excerpt) Read more at snopes.com ...
To just leave 200 - 400 buses sitting doing nothing...is a crying shame.
'Nuff said.............
Even if those busses were in the middle of nowhere, at least those people would be alive.
"One question about the school buses: If they had used the school buses to evacuate, where would they have taken all of those people? Do you just drive them out of town and leave them somewhere?"
Standing on the side of the road in a town where there is access to food and water would have been FAR BETTER than being stranded in the lawlessness of the Superdome.
Tell me you are kidding...........
If Mayor Nagin on the Thursday before Katrina went on TV and said "I need drivers" I think they would have had to turn away volunteers.
City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan.
Instead, local buses were used to ferry people from 12 pickup points to poorly supplied "shelters of last resort" in the city. An estimated 50,000 New Orleans households have no access to cars, Wilmot said.
snip [see Post 35]
Why didn't the city have police officers posted at the Superdome? They could also have had the fire departments park some water tankers there to provide clean water.
Guess all those cars I see in the streets of NO floated in from parts unknown.
"If they had used the school buses to evacuate, where would they have taken all of those people?"
Anywhere that would remain above water would have been an excellent start, and accomplished with drastically fewer fatalities, had the city's own evac plan been implemented.
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in·com·pe·tent
adj.
1. Not qualified in legal terms: a defendant who was incompetent to stand trial.
2. Inadequate for or unsuited to a particular purpose or application.
3. Devoid of those qualities requisite for effective conduct or action.
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stu·pid
adj., -er, -est.
1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.
2. Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.
3. Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless: a stupid mistake.
4. Dazed, stunned, or stupefied.
5. Pointless; worthless: a stupid job.
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crime
n.
1. An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction.
2. Unlawful activity: statistics relating to violent crime.
3. A serious offense, especially one in violation of morality.
4. An unjust, senseless, or disgraceful act or condition: It's a crime to squander our country's natural resources (or people...).
The head of NewOrleans Gumt is to blame for New Orleans. The governor of Louisiana belongs in jail with James Lee Witt!
Isn't that better than drowning?
Well, let's see. A logical analysis suggests that there are two possible ways those buses got there.
1) They sat there in the parking lot until the levee broke, and they were flooded in.
2) The mayor or school superintendent ordered the buses driven into the parking lots after they were flooded.
Option 1 is more likely, because it would be hard to line all those buses up so neatly, driving them under a couple of feet of water. Not impossible, but hard.
I still fail to see how either possibility exonerates the mayor and his evacuation team--if there was such a team--of responsibility for failing to make good use of the buses.
I bet any kid could drive one of those buses. Oh, that's right. I've already one that bet.
"City administrators distributed hundreds of DVDs in vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods"
Right here, you have an idiotically dissonant, bureaucratic act... if these neighborhoods were in such abject poverty, the ability to even play a DVD should have been suspect. So, which is it: near third-world helplessness, or nominally poor people with a house full of consumer electronics?
"Tell me you are kidding..........."
Yes, kidding. Snopes commnets were ridiculous.
Here are the requirements for bus driving experience during Hurricane:
1) Adjust bus rearview mirror.
2) See 10 foot wall of water bearing down on bus.
3) Put pedal to the metal and drive!
"I heard that Nagin didn't use the school buses for evac purposes because they didn't have bathrooms."
That's the new spin. It sounds slightly less inane than not using school busses because they weren't air conditioned.
I noticed that too.....stuff they say is untrue has truth in it...they pick and choose.
I rather be sitting in a bus 2 states away than sitting on a roof in downtown NO.
Your right about needing the shelters but I would have tried to get them out anyway. Total failure by the local gov.
Agreed! Of course that was arranged after the disaster with federal assistance and the eyes of the nation on the whole situation. Could they have sent 250,000 to Texas on Saturday or Sunday BEFORE the storm? I'd think you would grant that that is a very different situation.
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