I liked Nagin as mayor of NO. That emotional finger-pointing session was the first sign, to me, that he was in way over his head in this situation.
"We talked many times about commandeering tour buses and school buses," Tullier said. "There's plenty of stuff out there to put people in, but when push comes to shove the bus drivers are trying to get their own families out of town and can't be counted on."
Two options: Get a passenger from each bus to volunteer to drive, or convince the driver to use the bus as the means of transportation for getting his family out of town. There are certainly ways of solving the lack of drivers problem.
Instead, most of the RTA's buses were moved to a facility on Canal Street that officials thought -- wrongly -- would be safe from floodwaters. Some buses positioned on the riverfront were high and dry, but as the waters rose, getting them to the evacuees became a problem, and, according to Nagin, drivers weren't available anyway.
You don't wait until the water's rising during or after a hurricane to try to bus people out. By then it's far too late for that.
Howell, like Nagin, said she doesn't think the city could have done it. "There was not enough money to plan for this scenario, because this may or may not have happened," she said.
Maybe they could have used the salaries and benefit money of some of those phantom police officers.
"Mayor Nagin was not able to have his 'bullhorn moment,' " Xavier University political scientist Silas Lee said. "There was a big difference: Giuliani was able to rally the citizens and the nation against a common enemy. In this case the enemy was Mother Nature, and it's harder to rally people against Mother Nature."
You mean the enemy wsan't President Bush?
OK. So they had a plan. They did not use the plan, but I guess they had one. I have yet to read what the "plan" said about where to take these 100,000+ people. Were they to live on the busses till they got the all clear?