Good job ferreting this out. The visual evidence is stunning.

Score another one for the P.J. Crowd, great job Paul!

YOU REPTARDS JUST WON'T LET UP WILL YOU? STOP TEARING DOWN THAT WONDERFULLL MAYUR NAGIN!!!! IF CHIMPY MCBUCHITLERBURTON WASN'T SO CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT HE WOULD HAVE DRIVEN THOSE BUSSESS HISOWNSELF!!!!

/moonbat

Sorry! Just had to beat the BDSers to it for a change.

unfuckingbelievable!

meanwhile, the pleading incompetent mayor and msm reporters filling the bunkyards with the alleged baby-rapes, muggings, suicides, dead bodies, and shootouts...

next think you know, we'll find out that money that was supposed to go to aiding people went directly into his pocket.

unfuckingbelievable.

I believe the accepted safe seating, of adults, for a standard school bus is 46. So it might have taken up to roughly 1/3 longer to move the people, but still a hell of a lot better than what we saw.

Good illustraion.
Except "Convntion".

Also, you should draw a red rectangle around the area that you enlarged. At first, I thought the bus barn was a lot bigger than the superdome, untill I understood that the arrow pointed to the enlarged portion, and didn't point north.

Could you tell me please just who you had in mind to drive all those buses on a Sunday morning? Takes a special license (trucking license) to drive a bus, doesn't it? Had all available bus drivers fled the city early on, and if not, would any potential bus driver want to be paid?

Sheik Yur Bouty that made my day.

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> I believe the accepted safe seating, of adults, for a standard school bus is 46.

Hey! Thank you Cliff Clavin!
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But you are missing a couple of things as Herman astutely points out.

Governor Blanco already said you can't get Lousiana government workers to work on a sunny day, so absent a meterological analysis, those busses might as well be under water.

Also, before you could allow any untrained, non-union bus drivers to rescue the Superdome refugees, they would have to attend diversity awareness classes followed by sexual harrassment training. By the time they finished training the Superdome would have been under water.

So Nagin was better off hiding under his desk and bitching out the Feds.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509120005

I have little doubt that you'll ever issue a correction but the link above disputes that picture. The overwhelming majority of those buses were broken down. They were not ready to evacuate anyone.

I dunno, Herman, seems like that Jabbar Gibson kid did a pretty good job. I expect there would have been a lot of volunteers both to drive and to ride with the inexperienced drivers, assuming that was all that was available which is by no means a given.

Herman perfectly demonstrates the mindset that failed so many poor people in N.O. The state, city and RTA had a plan that included busing residents to Red Cross shelters. But the RTA ultimately punted because they could not find enough volunteer drivers.

Competent public officials would have had in their plan the provisions for paid drivers and training them to be drivers if needed. Instead, the local officials did not follow through on their bus plan, leaving the "shelters of last resort" as the only resort -- an option that FEMA had criticized for years, pointing out that the shelters could get ugly if the power and sewer went out.

Anyone that can drive a stick can drive a bus. There's not much to it. There were likely a hundred LANG soldiers nearby qualified to drive a bus. Chances are, given how ill-prepared NO was, the LANG had no idea where any buses were located. Someone in city government however should have known. If one were to call it as they see it, one would have to simply conclude that NO and LA government freaked and were incapable of rationally dealing with the event.

The X factor can you read?

Not a word of your link spoke about the busses in Algiers that were available AFTER the flood. But not try keeping the spin going.

I apologize for slandering Gov. Blanco. The "sunny day" quote was of course made by Senator Landrieu.

"Senator Landrieu, I want to ask you, and I'm going to ask you both--" some other senator was on there, too "--about the local response. Was it incompetent and insulting for Mayor Ray Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation, but then to leave buses--" and we got a picture of these buses "--hundreds of buses idle so that they could be flooded instead of using them to get people out?"

LANDRIEU: I will. I will answer it. I am not going to level criticism at local and state officials. Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane.

The City of New Orleans had several hundred bus drivers on the city payroll driving city buses. All Nagin had to do was to call them to duty PRIOR to the hurricane. It doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out. Just a tiny bit of common sense.

Great job guys. One other point though; I seem to recall that when the subject of buses came up in the early moments of all the turmoil,the Mayor said he didn't want any school buses. He wanted Greyhounds to get the people out. I guess he didn't want to use school buses anyway.
Whatever! This guy is un-credible!!!

If Gore had been President there would have been more buses available for evacuation. If John Kerry had been President he would have been down there personally evacuating refugees in his Swift Boat.

Puddin',

You're close. Gore would have invented buses that drive themselves.

And I'm sure that Kerry's memory of personally rescuing people from NO in his Swift Boat is seared, seared in his memory.

I find it hard to believe that of the 10s of thousands of people stuck in New Orleans in the Superdome and the Convention center that none of them could drive a bus and drive themselves and 50 other people to Baton Rouge. And so what if there were only 700 buses that went under water instead of 2000 (the liberal media said 10,000 people died and that is a lie- 900 have officially died- so they lied 11 times instead of 2 times) That is still about 35,000 people that could have been evacuated in 1 (one) trip.

I saw this picture and similar commentary on blog(s) weeks ago. Which doesn't make the point invalid, just a bit behind the times.

"The [Orleans Parish school] district owns 324 buses but 70 are broken down."

Do you have any proof that the buses in your photo worked? Or are you just making that presumption?

There's no question that Nagin screwed up. But FEMA's whole purpose is to take charge and coordinate a response to situations that local and state officials can't handle. Nagin couldn't handle this, fine. Neither could Blanco, fine. Neither could FEMA . . . not fine at all.

I think it was FEMA's responsibility to provide buses and drivers! Just name me one city in the United States where local people are allowed to drive buses. All buses, trains, planes and dog carts require a special FEMA license.

X factor -

If you look at the quote from the T-P article on broken school buses, it dates back to 2003. Please tell me what a two year old article on school buses has to do with anything?