Here's another bus story that was in the Baton Rouge paper today.
Disaster response
Records, interviews reveal some of why storm relief took so long
By MARSHA SHULER
mshuler@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau
Where were the buses?
No image of the post-Katrina calamity is stronger than the tens of thousands of urban storm survivors awaiting rescue for days.
Stranded residents at the Superdome, Convention Center, a Metairie interstate intersection and a Chalmette port grew restless and combative as temperatures soared, people died around them and getting basic necessities -- food and water -- became a daily battle.
"They wanted to know where help was. So did we, quite frankly," said Louisiana National Guard Maj. Ed Bush, who shared the nightmare at the downtown Superdome with up to 20,000 stranded people.
Hurricane Katrina slammed into southeast Louisiana early Monday, Aug. 29. Evacuation buses didn't start showing up in large numbers until Thursday. And some people didn't get picked up until Saturday afternoon.
What happened in between? Why did it take so long? Here are some answers, based on interviews and limited public records made available:
# New Orleans Regional Transit Authority buses weren't available. Most were flooded by the same waters that trapped residents. Buses that could have taken people out of the city before the storm did not.
# Buses that the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised reportedly within hours of Katrina's landfall weren't actually ordered until early Wednesday.
# State government didn't have transportation assets to send. It would take days to mobilize a fleet of school buses from throughout the state.
# There was no emergency plan for moving people before or after the hurricane -- just a general framework that was yet to be fleshed out.
It's been almost two months since Katrina. But questions continue about pre-Katrina preparation and post-Katrina response.
The Advocate made public records requests for documents from key state and federal players and agencies. But little information has been provided about what happened immediately before and after the hurricane and the levee breaks that flooded the city.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco refused to release documents requested from her office, citing a state law that shields her office from disclosure.
Blanco's executive counsel, Terry Ryder, said late last week that the governor's office is complying with requests for similar documents from two congressional committees. The many documents are being compiled, and they will be made public, he said.
Federal officials as of last week had not produced records involving the roles played by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown and their offices.
But interviews, research of emergency operations plans, and some public documents reveal that the emergency response planners knew what had to happen in the wake of a hurricane that brought such destruction.
It was the delivery of the response -- who, what, when, why and how, as state Office of Homeland Security operations chief Lt. Col. Bill Doran puts it -- that was missing for the gigantic operation that had to occur.
Two weeks before Hurricane Katrina put its indelible mark on Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, a group of emergency planning officials finished general planning for a disaster similar to that about to unfold. It was the fictitious Hurricane Pam. Federal, state and New Orleans officials were involved in the FEMA-funded project.
Some of the general planning bore fruit, agreed Doran and state medical director Dr. Jimmy Guidry, who participated in the planning exercise.
For instance, the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was ready with boats and the U.S. Coast Guard with helicopters for rescue operations as soon as Katrina's winds dropped enough -- not the numbers that would eventually be required, but a quick response.
And responders were ready to set up medical needs shelters and knew what federal resources to tap. Guidry already had sites in mind and medical supplies on standby. He quickly activated a national medical network, with out-of-state hospitals ready to accept patients that would have overwhelmed local facilities.
But the rest of the planning was still a work in progress: How do you move that many people? Where do you take them? How do you get food, water and other essential supplies to tens of thousands of people needing evacuation as well as those trying to help them? How do you handle the basic logistics?
Up to 90 percent, or 1.2 million, of the area's population heeded evacuation warnings, officials estimate. Absent that, the death toll over 1,000 in Louisiana would have been far greater.
But many residents either couldn't or didn't want to evacuate. They became the basis of a real-life exercise that tested the nation's emergency response system.
The Superdome's population was about 10,000 Sunday night, Aug. 28, the day before Katrina hit. The numbers doubled quickly after the storm as more survivors showed up and survivors rescued from rooftops and watery streets were dropped off.
"It was horrible, absolutely unlivable," said Bush. It was a daily struggle to get food and water, but people did, he said. There were six deaths -- including one drug overdose and a suicide jumper, he said. There were fights, but no little girl with a slit throat as was widely reported, he said.
Meanwhile, at Interstate 10 and Causeway Boulevard in Metairie, a State Police trooper reported finding "a large number of hostile evacuees" Tuesday, long before crowds swelled to as high as 10,000. The hostility, the trooper wrote, "could be attributed to the long wait to be rescued and the long wait to be transported to various shelters."
He went on to suggest the obvious: To avoid future hostile situations, get transportation and shelters lined up more quickly.
As thousands of storm survivors waited for transportation out, hundreds of nearby New Orleans transit system buses couldn't be used.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that, before the storm hit, the buses were moved to higher ground that traditionally didn't flood. But this time the area, like 80 percent of New Orleans, did flood.
Even if the buses hadn't flooded, Nagin said, drivers would have been in short supply because many left town.
FEMA pre-positions supplies ahead of storms so it can be ready to respond quickly afterward. Pre-Katrina water, MREs (meals ready to eat), cots, pallets of tarps, blankets and plastic sheeting were stored as close as Camp Beauregard near Alexandria and as far away as Atlanta, Ga.
Buses are not among the pre-staged supplies.
Within hours of Katrina hitting on Monday, FEMA promised to deliver buses, according to Blanco.
On Tuesday, Blanco aide Leonard Kleinpeter recalled, the governor asked him to start trying to arrange for use of school buses.
FEMA relies on the U.S. Department of Transportation, which has a contract with a provider to locate for-hire buses and other types of transportation and get them to staging areas.
Federal transportation records show FEMA gave the agency the go-ahead at 12:45 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 31. Five hours later, buses were being dispatched from points around the country to LaPlace, 25 miles west of New Orleans, and by midnight some 200 buses had arrived.
By the end of Thursday, there were 657 buses on hand. By Friday there were 935 buses and by Saturday 1,094 buses.
In congressional testimony earlier this month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta blamed FEMA for holding up his department's efforts to move people out of New Orleans. He said buses that arrived in the first wave Wednesday sat there because FEMA didn't give orders to move.
"What we heard from drivers who arrived at the rallying point in the first hours of the first day was that dispatch operations of the buses were being handled on a piecemeal basis," said DOT spokesman Brian Turmail.
Questions to FEMA in Washington, D.C., about the bus situation went unanswered.
By Wednesday morning, Blanco's school buses weren't showing up either.
"Some districts wanted to go ahead and have school. They thought 'It's a hurricane. It's over. We can start school tomorrow,'" Kleinpeter said.
At nearly midnight Wednesday, Blanco issued an executive order commandeering school buses. "We had to move," Kleinpeter said.
"There was no time for negotiation," with school systems, said Ryder, who drafted the order as well as one issued the next day that allowed more types of people to drive the buses.
Blanco's office called Capital Area Transit System CEO Dwight Brashear Wednesday evening as the bus order was being crafted to seek his help coordinating bus rescue missions. He reported for duty at the state emergency operations center early Thursday morning.
That same morning, the state Department of Education official who deals with transportation issues, Donna Nola-Gainey, was called in to make phone calls and get commitments for buses.
"Instead of waiting for a call from school districts to say what's available, we became more aggressive," said Brashear. "Our goal Thursday was getting commitments and getting 1,000 buses coming toward us."
More buses started arriving Thursday, and the numbers continued to increase into Friday, he said.
Nola-Gainey said education officials estimate that approximately 700 buses were dispatched from all over the state. Brashear, who coordinated the movement of the buses with the 5th Army division, puts the number closer to 1,000 buses.
Some 15,000 to 20,000 people were moved using the school buses, according to data received from school systems.
The highway coaches FEMA brought in were being used to transport people to shelters in Houston, Dallas and other cities outside Louisiana, Brashear said. Some school buses made the long hauls into Texas too, he said. But those were exceptions, he said.
"If you got on a school bus, chances are you were headed to the airport and being airlifted out of there," Brashear said.
The first FEMA buses to start moving the crowds didn't show up until Thursday about 10 a.m. at the Superdome, Bush recalls. About 70 buses were filled and sent off. Then it was several hours before others showed up, he said.
But the activity started stepping up and by Saturday evening the Dome rescue was pretty much finished. More people kept showing up even into Sunday needing transportation out, Bush said.
At I-10 and Causeway Boulevard, the once sea of evacuees was pretty much cleared by 1:15 p.m. Saturday, according to news accounts.
By week's end, the wait for a way out was also over for those who had made the New Orleans Convention Center an impromptu shelter and those who had to be ferried, then bused, from the St. Bernard port.
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I was surprised to see the infamous bus photo on the front page of The Advocate!
The major point that must be made clear about the buses and evacuations is:
in a natural disaster, evacuation plans are and must be the responsibility of, and carried out by the operational authority of, state and local officials - not FEMA.
And this discussion about buses, by state and local authorities, rightly belonged to, and should have been going on during, the week prior to when Katrina made landfall.
Those discussions should have been conducted and concluded by the Thursday prior to the Sunday/Monday Katrina hit. That was not FEMA's responsibility.
And those discussions should have resulted in a mandatory evacuation plan that should have began on the Friday before Katrina hit, and used busses for free transportation for people who needed them. That was not FEMA's responsibility.
Not one thing about that not being done was the fault of FEMA and yet the fact that it was not done created the human disasters that FEMA was then blamed for not having picked up the pieces of quickly enough.
Nagin and Blanco carried out the reverse of all moral requirements regarding a mandatory evacuation.
If there is any moral requirement in an evacuation it is to care for those who will be most vulnerable if you don't get them evacuated.
The lowest lying areas of New Orleans, the areas most in danger of flooding from levee breaks were also the areas with more residents with the least means, financially and in terms of transportation.
Every hospital in New Orleans had its emergency room and it backup power generation capabilities in either the basement or the first floor, and if the levees broke they were all subject to flooding.
The jail was at an elevation that made it subject to flooding if the levees broke.
Many nursing homes were in low-lying flood prone areas.
Everyone, Blanco, Nagin, everyone was told Katrina would be a levee-busting category five hurricane; in as much as the levees were known to be designed only for a category three.
Every reasonable assumption about the possible problems from Katrina said - during the week before it hit - EVACUATE, there is going to be flooding in New Orleans.
Did Blanco and Nagin insure that the most vulnerable got out - those who needed transportation assistance, those hospitalized or in nursing homes, those locked in floodable jail cells?
No. They had a traffic plan by which those with the means could drive themselves out. In other words they mostly helped those who were capable of helping themselves.
Even those in jail are human beings and the indifference shown there to me epitomized the indifference that Blanco and Nagin showed in their negligent attitude towards the evacuation. The officers and attendants at the jail simply left, with the prisoners locked in their cells, as the flood waters began to rise. Two and half days later, with the water having risen to five feet in the cells, they were finally rescued. I have no doubt the prisoners would have rather had pictures taken with them naked wearing women's panties on their heads. I cannot think of anything more torturous than being locked in a jail cell that is slowly being flooded, for two and half days, with no one else but the locked up prisoners around, no electricty, no anything but the constantly rising flood waters, and the humans locked in. By the time the waters were reaching five feet, would you have gone mad?
As those who were driving out of New Orleans filled the highway, Blanco was asked what more they might do, and her response was: "we can pray".
In other words, she was leaving to fate the lives of all who could not evacuate themselves. Yea, pray for the weak, the hospitalized and the infirm and everyone whose evacuation was needed in the face of a coming category five storm.
I do not understand why her citizens are not demanding her impeachment.