Amtrak, Nagin Argue Over Rescue Train

Officials at Amtrak say they offered to run a special train out of New Orleans that could have evacuated hundreds of residents hours before Hurricane Katrina struck - but city officials turned the offer down.

"We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black told the Washington Post on Sunday. "The city declined."

The train had room for "several hundred passengers," the Post said. But it left loaded only with railroad equipment - destined for higher and drier ground.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said Sunday he had no idea what Black was talking about.

I don't know where that's coming from," he told NBC's "Meet the Press." "Amtrak never contacted me to make that offer. As a matter of fact, we checked the Amtrak lines for availability, and every available train was booked, as far as the report that I got, through September. So I'd like to see that report."

Nagin also offered a new explanation as to why he didn't press hundreds of city buses into service to aid in evacuation efforts.

"Sure, here was lots of buses out there," he told "Meet the Press." "But guess what? You can't find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome."

The New Orleans Democrat had a different excuse tens days ago, when asked about using his city's bus fleet.

"One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here," he told WWL Radio.

"I'm like - you've got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

Asked about the buses two days before his "Meet the Press" interview, Nagin told NBC's "Dateline": "I dont know. That is question for somebody else."

The Leftists continue to come up with all sorts of excuses as to why the buses were not used. Pasted below my commentary is the News Alert in the Times Picayune dated Saturday August 27. That news alert stated that all essential 'SCHOOL DISTRICT" employees should contact their supervisor. A sane person would think that bus drivers are essential employees if a mandatory evacation order has been issued. But apparantly not in New Orleans.

Pasted below the Times Picayune news alert is a liberal blog trying to come up with some lame excuses to counter the damaging picture of the school buses under water. The liberals first argue that even if the people were evacuated, there was no place to take them. Sorry, that is a false premise. The South is known as the Bible Belt for good reason. There are hundreds of churches who would have gladly housed a busload of New Orlean evacuees on Saturday and Sunday night.

Then to show their total ignorance, one leftist tries to argue that perhaps only one half of the flooded buses were operational on Saturday. Well, that flies in the face of reality. If Hurricane Katrina had not hit, those buses and their BUS DRIVERS would have been used on Monday morning to haul kids to school. Since the school district had had the entire summer to do maintenance repair on the buses, I would expect that the entire fleet was in tiptop shape.

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/2005_08_27.html

Saturday, August 27, 2005 Hurricane Prompts School Closures

St. Charles schools will be closed Monday and Tuesday and Jefferson Parish schools will close Monday, officials announced. New Orleans public schools will close on Monday if Mayor Ray Nagin orders an evacuation. “We’ll make decisions on the rest of the week based on the storm and the damage,” said spokeswoman Pat Bowers.

Essential employees should contact their supervisor.

http://cantkeepquiet.com/?p=369

“They had a whole fleet of school buses they could have used to evacuate everybody.”

That’s all I hear from the FoxNews network. Over and over about how the school buses weren’t used and how that would have made all the difference in the world in New Orleans. How everyone could have been evacuated. Um, I don’t think so.

People are making a bigger deal about the buses than they should. New Orleans and the surrounding area is smaller than Orange County, FL. Matter of fact Orleans Parish has less than 1/3 the total number of students than Orange County, FL. At least it did before Katrina.

Here’s the truth about school buses (the type in question):

A large school bus holds about 90 people if they sit three to a seat. That’s what the federal government tells the school districts when trying to figure how much to charge for the buses. They hold 90 people if they aren’t any bigger than most 3rd or 4th graders. From about 5th grade up you’re going to get 2 people to a seat at best. You’re down to about 60 to 70 people for a large bus.

Not all school buses are this big. In Orange County about 1/3 are that size. Most are your average size school bus which holds roughly 50 people. Short buses (yes, we have those) seat about 10.

Orange County moves about 63,000 students to and from school a day. However, not all of those students are on the buses at the same time. First high school students get picked up and dropped off. Then elementary. Then middle school. There are not enough buses to pick up that many students at one time. Forget about having enough drivers. Orange County Public Schools has 997 buses.

Let’s do the math. Now remember, Orleans Parish has less than 1/3 the number of students that Orange County, FL has therefore it has less than 1/3 of the buses. Let’s be generous and say that New Orleans has 300 average size buses. If each bus was loaded with 50 people that would be 15,000 people that could have been evacuated using the buses.

Buses are slow beasts and Baton Rouge could not have held all the evacuees from New Orleans. No matter what anyone wants to think, if there just wasn’t enough space. Baton Rouge was also not far enough away from New Orleans not to get hit with hurricane force winds. Therefore dumping the people in the street or leaving them on the buses would not be an option.

Again, though, let’s be generous and say that Baton Rouge could hold all those people. On a normal day it would take at least 90 minutes to drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. According to a fellow teacher at my school, it took some of her relatives at least 3 times that amount of time to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on the Saturday before Katrina struck. That’s 4 1/2 hours to Baton Rouge. At least.

If the buses were able to, they could turn around and get maybe one more load of people. That’s a huge if, but I’m trying to be generous here.

All together, maybe 30,000 people could have been evacuated using school buses. Maybe. Trust me, that’s being really, really generous. It’s also leaving at least 70,000 people stranded in New Orleans. At least.

Should the buses have been put into play? Sure.

All those buses, though, wouldn’t have been able to evacuate the entire city of New Orleans. It would have also been a logistic nightmare that would have severely hampered the ability of the buses to get even 15,000 people out of the area. Unless the mayor of New Orleans could rely on Black Magic to levitate the buses over the traffic and into multiple communities, they wouldn’t have made that big a difference. If you still think 300 school buses could have evacuated all those people, think again. Buses from all over Louisiana and other states are being used to evacuate people. Even so, the buses need to take more than one trip. And the evacuation continues.

School buses could have helped…but where would they go with all the evacuees? Would they be able to have enough gas to transport the people? Who would drive the school buses? They’re not like your regular car…they handle differently so not anyone with a drivers license can drive a school bus. I guess the right is trying to find any excuse to minamize the inadequate, slow, disorganized federal response.

No, I hadn’t but that is something that needed to be looked into. Looking at a list of the 100 largest school districts based on census data from 2000, East Baton Rouge Parish has about 1/4 the number of students that Orange County Public Schools has. At best that would be 200 more buses, however, it might be difficult for Baton Rouge to get people to drive into an area that was about to get hit head on by a hurricane.

I had some observations of my own (many of which were also made in the article) and I’d appreciate some verification: Most photos of 550 buses underwater in N.O. are from the NOISD bus depot. At least half of these buses weren’t even working to begin with. That takes us to ~275 functional buses (just imagine how long it would have taken to run around, trying each one of them to see if they worked or not).

It is something I’ve been suspecting after seeing footage of the buses and where they are located–it sure looks like a bus depot/warehouse area to me. How many of them were inoperational? Could they really have been used prior to the hurricane to evacuate large numbers of the sick and elderly? Clearly once the floodwaters came in to the city that was no longer a viable plan (since the buses also were flooded). Was the initial plan just to use them to put people in the Superdome and other shelters (I’ve read elsewhere that was part of the plan for those without cars, instead of transporting people to other cities)? If that was the case, the problem of the Superdome and convention center shelters would have remained. I don’t know the answer to these questions yet, as I am still looking. I’m concerned to find out more information because I have family and friends in the gulf region (in Gonzales,LA., Slidell, LA., and Gulfport, MS.). When all is said and done, two weeks later I’m still thinking that the federal government, and esp. FEMA, is most too blame. Nothing I’ve read since has altered that initial view.

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