Posted on 09/13/2005 7:26:13 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
Ouch! No doubt with sitting in the special seat, behind the driver.
I was talking about the school bus keys, to get the buses out and the people as well. Those buses could have come back in to the city later to ferry aid packages and aid personnel as well.
Does anyone know what happened to Jabbar? Is it true or urban legend that he was/is being charged with vehicle theft? (And I am asking with all sincerity...I have seen conflicting reports here on FR.)
BTTT
You know, that almost sounds like someone brought up the Amtrak reservations web page and said, "nope, trains all booked" so they blew off the option. The second worst thing would be if the NO people simply called the 1-800 number and spoke to a reservations clerk. Surely it wouldn't be that hokey, would it?
Here's how you get a Bus driver when a hurricane is bearing down on your city.
"Show up for work or you're FIRED!"
My dad's proposal was one he used when he was a community board planner - in the event of a evacuation, each local congregation should be preallotted a certain number of city buses or school buses depending on the size of the congregation.
Each congregation should have enough volunteer drivers and backups as well as volunteers to assist in gathering people.
My dad reasoned that local pastors had enough community prestige to be obeyed by their congregations and to maintain order in an emergency, that congregations would know the situation on the ground better (i.e. who is a shut-in, who has diabetes, etc.) than bureaucrats and be able to round up evacuees more effectively, that the church building itself would serve as a rendezvous center that everyone could find and get to quickly and that pastors could make contacts with other pastors outside the danger zone to arrange for emergency lodging and services.
It would have been far from easy, but a proper evac plan executed by city and state would have gotten at least 50,000 people without transportation out of NOLA, and probably a lot more. We have seen photos of 560+ buses (municipal plus school buses) that sat unused. They needed to do at least one run on Sat. and at least one (preferably two) runs on Sunday. Obviously they had to plan ahead to do it properly, have drivers available, etc. With real planning the Governor could/should have ordered buses to come from around the state, as she had the power to do (as reflected in her emergency order on the Wed. AFTER the storm when she legally commandeered all buses in the state). As for driving times, they failed to do the "contra-flow" until the very end, I believe - I saw photos from that weekend with all the traffic lanes coming into the city virtually empty of traffic while people sat bumper-to-bumper trying to get out. IF they had done contra-flow all weekend, as would be required by the enormity of the situation, they could have done much better. And no, this is not hindsight, I was posting all weekend before the storm saying they'd better be pulling out all stops to get every possible person out of NOLA.
That was my thought exactly. Does that make Greyhound Bus Drivers heroes or idiots?
Why didn't Nagin drive a bus full of his people out?
Your dad is a very smart man. That would have been ideal. He should write it up and sell it. Or maybe mail it to some of the bigger cities.
Reports are that there were also 400-500 metro busses available.
FEMA is not a first-responder.
You cannot count on the fed. govt to respond for several days after a disaster.
I've read that it was up to 2 weeks before there was federal help after Hurricane Andrew.
Local politicians are paid to take care of the citizens who elect them to office.
This was a massive failure on the state and local level.
The federal response was actually pretty fast, given how long it took after Andrew.
You know, it must be really difficult for a black Mayor to be so grossly stupid and incompetent that he makes Marion Barry look like Winston Churchill.
It's fortunate that Nagin's huge melon is so empty --- the space is needed to rehouse evacuees.
ping
ping
"I suppose we just leave all the atheists behind, huh?"
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