More bus antics

The "Mayor Nagin failed to execute the evacuation plan" nonsense still permeates the right blogosphere. First of all, some facts:

1. Mayor Nagin did NOT have the right, under Louisiana law, to confiscate property for use in the evacuation plan. His statement at the news conference that he had the right to do so was pure bluster. Only Governor Blanco had that power.
2. Mayor Nagin did know that the buses existed, because on June 9, 2005, he requested of the Orleans Parish School Board that they put their bus fleet at his disposal for evacuation use in the event of a hurricane. The request was tabled for later consideration. Due to the fact that the OPSB web server is underwater I don't know whether the School Board ever acted on that request. I doubt it.
3. However, even if he had dispatched armed officers to seize the buses (which were guarded by OPSD police), there wasn't enough buses there to be worthwhile. Media Matters has documented that there existed approximately 600 usable buses within the city limits of New Orleans, including the OPSB fleet and Nagin's own Regional Transit Authority (note that the RTA provided transportation for middle school and high school students using the normal city buses, so the Orleans Parish School Board had fewer buses than you would expect of a district its size). The nearest high ground is a 3 hour drive away under normal traffic conditions on the three (3) land routes out of New Orleans. According to witnesses, these highways were so crowded with private automobiles that it instead took 7 hours to reach that high ground. Thus the buses would have been able to make at most one trip. Meaning that the *only* way to completely evacuate the 100,000+ people left in the city after those with autos fled was to have 1500+ buses already prepositioned within the city. Which would be difficult even under the best of conditions -- the entire Greyhound Inc. bus fleet is only 1950 buses!
4. Nagin instead decided to evacuate anybody who couldn't leave on their own to the Superdome, which was designed to withstand 200mph winds, using the existing city bus fleet (which was entirely adequate for that purpose). An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes Nagin setting up 12 neighborhood collection points (note that New Orleans is geographically a fairly small city) from whence people would be carried to the Superdome via the city buses.
5. Nagin is also faulted for not putting the buses on "high ground" in order to use for Stage II of the evacuation plan he put into place (the one that called for people to be evacuated to the Superdome, and from there to high ground a three hour drive away). The question of what qualifies as "high ground" remains. The City has precious little of that. The riverfront parking garage is mostly below ground (i.e. they would have been swamped there). The upper decks of the Superdome parking garage were well above water, but their exit ramps were under 4 feet of water. The parking garages of most downtown buildings were also below ground and thus under water. The notion of parking them on the elevated freeway is utterly ludicrous -- the winds of a Category 4 hurricane would have tumbled them like chess pieces, completely blocking the freeway and rendering it unusable for the Phase II evacuation. It's unclear where you could park 265 city buses on the surface streets of the French Quarter, about the only "high ground" in the city. I don't know what the final disposition of the city bus fleet was, but given the situation, I really can't fault the mayor for saying "f'it, we'll let the state and the feds figure out how to do stage II if we need it."

All in all, Mayor Nagin's sins here were minor. At best he did not preserve resources that he could have used to help himself after the hurricane passed. Nagin had no control over the levees (they are owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- I have walked those levees, and that's what the signs say, 'Warning: Entering U.S. Government Property'), Nagin didn't have enough buses to evacuate New Orleans before the hurricane hit, and there are undoubtedly people alive today because they were evacuated by what buses he did have to the Superdome and Convention Center who would otherwise be dead. The aftermath was out of Nagin's control -- his city was underwater, his resources were drowned, all he had was a handful of homeless firefighters and police officers to try to handle a huge national disaster. I am puzzled as to what exactly the Republicans hope to gain by attacking Mayor Nagin... he wasn't the one dithering about bureaucratic bullshit while people died. That was Governor Blanco and President Bush. Somebody needed to step up and lead and say "f*** bureaucratic bullshit, I'm going to save those people's lives." Unfortunately, neither Blanco nor Bush did so, and thus hundreds died who should be alive.

- Badtux the Bus Penguin