KITTERY, Maine - When the yellow school bus pulled in front of the Superdome in New Orleans last weekend, no one knew what to do with it.
The empty vehicle was not one of the buses chartered by the government to transport Hurricane Katrina victims out of the area. The bus, offering to help as many hurricane evacuees as possible, seemed to come out of nowhere.
"Someone called it the magic bus because no one knew where it came from," said Dan Corcoran, the Kittery businessman who hired the bus driver to go from Houston to New Orleans to help evacuees.
Corcoran, owner of Jackson’s Hardware & Marine, had contacted the Alamo Bus Co. in Houston a few days after the flood waters in New Orleans had trapped thousands of residents inside the city.
Corcoran wired the company money and chartered a bus to New Orleans, telling the company driver to pick up anyone he could find and get them out of the city.
On Sept. 2, a driver and three security officers boarded the bus and drove through the night to New Orleans, Corcoran said. When they arrived in the city the next morning, a police escort took them to the Superdome, where thousands of evacuees were located.
Police officials decided to use Corcoran’s charter as a shuttle service, transporting elderly and ill people from the Superdome to the city’s airport, where a triage center had been set up.
"They didn’t know where the bus came from, but they obviously made very good use of it," Corcoran said last week....
