Bush at 38% - Right Wing Crowd Blames Mayor Not Busing Out Entire New Orleans Population

The Blog From Another Dimension: More Katrina Notes:

The idea is that the buses could have been used but were not, and that Nagin is to blame for it. That's the web-wide right-wing talking point. They tack on the idea that Nagin waited too long for the mandatory evacuation, and they're in glee for someone to shift the blame to, and off of their dear leader Bush--as if Nagin making any errors means that Bush didn't, or that Bush's errors are now okay.

Of course, it's total bull. The timeline shows that: Sunday morning 1 am, Katrina upgraded to Category 4 (anything less would not have triggered a mandatory evacuation), 9:30 am, Nagin calls for the mandatory evacuation, 6 am Monday morning, Katrina makes landfall. Now, you could fault Nagin for waiting eight and a half hours before making the evacuation order--what his reasons for waiting were, I do not know and will not guess--but the whole bus evacuation thing is idiotic, and the idea that he could have called the mandatory evacuation in time to do it right is also fiction. The plan requires two days to carry out. Katrina was not upgraded to Category 4 until 29 hours before it hit, so even if Nagin had jumped right to it the moment the upgrade came, he still would have been 20 hours too late.

Could Nagin have seen the possibility of Katrina hitting New Orleans specifically and being a Category 4 or higher 20 hours before it became official? Yes. However, city and state officials do not evacuate entire cities based on guesses.

About the buses: what if Nagin had mobilized them right away? First off, there were nowhere near enough buses to get even a sizable percentage of the people out within 29 hours. Second, the logistics would have been horrendous: you try to find 500 school bus drivers in a city where everyone is hightailing out of there. Could inexperienced drivers have been used? Sure, if you wanted a guaranteed percentage of accidents and screw-ups leading to several deaths and many more injuries. And last, but not least, given the time frame, even with the best of planning, most of those buses would have been stuck on roads out of New Orleans when the full force of Katrina hit, probably killing hundreds of people right there.

Walter Maestri, Director of Emergency Management in New Orleans, said in an interview with Bill Maher that the buses were, in fact, being used in the limited ways they could be used for, and were returned when all that could be done was done.

The fact is, the buses were used, as well as they could be, before Katrina hit, to get people to safety as well as could be done. That the people bused to the Superdome languished and starved and died was not the fault of Nagin or anyone else locally. It was the fault of the federal government, which could get rescue efforts to Indonesia within 48 hours but took more than twice that long to get things started up for New Orleans. Nagin sent people to the Superdome expecting the federal government to do its job. Bush fumbled the handoff.