Katrina: don't bother to use local buses take two

You know why all those local school buses, that took twelve hours to show up after the governor asked for them, did not get used earlier?
Because the Governor asked FEMA to send in buses from other states, and it took FEMA a few days to arrange and drive them in...

Even NOLA's Time Picyune says it was bungled"


BATON ROUGE -- Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, thousands of people were trapped in the city without food, water and medical care and growing increasingly desperate for rescue. But a top aide to Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent out an e-mail informing his colleagues that his staff had stopped calling for the buses needed to evacuate people from the Superdome and other places of refuge.
"NO MORE CALLS FOR BUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Ty Bromell wrote Wednesday morning, Aug. 31. "My people are not calling for buses now." ...
No, because they are being beamed in via Scotty's transporter...they don't have to drive a thousand miles to get there from Illinois or Kansas City, they can be there instantly..

Bromell, who heads Blanco's Office of Rural Development, said he had gotten word -- from Leonard Kleinpeter, a special assistant to the governor who was spearheading the effort to wrangle buses from school boards, churches and other groups -- that the vehicles were no longer needed.
The understanding, Bromell said, was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had enough buses on the way, and that the military also would airlift people from the Superdome on Chinook helicopters.

Ummm...you can't evacuate 35thousand people via helicopter...a Nam vet joked a 20 passenger Huey could hold 45 Vietnamese in a pinch...well, a Chinook can carry33 to 44 troops...so maybe 50 civilians...

So calculate how long it would take...not to mention that it's risky to land in high winds...


In the postmortem on the state and federal response to Katrina, one of the key questions will be why it took so long to get thousands of people out of New Orleans after the storm.
Indeed, Blanco focused specifically on the federal failure to quickly provide buses in the written narrative that she supplied last week to congressional committees investigating the government response to the storm. She noted a conversation on the day of the storm with Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA, promising her that "FEMA has 500 buses on standby, ready to be deployed." When those did not arrive, the governor's staff jumped into action to get their own buses, Blanco wrote in her day-by-day breakdown of her activities. ...

Translation:BECAUSE the Governor saw FEMA as a magic tooth fairy, she didn't bother to use local resources....
And as my earlier post on bureaucrats and paperwork said, she now has 100 000 memos to prove she did everything correctly, never mind that she actually undermined those who were gathering local resources to help...

So the local buses could have moved in by wed but were stopped by the governor...and the FEMA buses arrived in NORTHERN Louisiana on Wed night...