Bus Story Debunked?

BillHobbs blogged ThinkProgress.org claims that it has "debunked" the claim that New Orleans had a huge bus fleet that it could have used to evacuate the poor from the city before Hurricane Katrina hit, but a careful analysis of ThinkProgress's article makes it clear that the Left-wing website has it wrong. In fact, the piece helps clarify the true scope of the failure of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babbling Blanco to use the transportation assets they had in a timely manner.... Nagin did leave hundreds of buses behind, unused. In fact, according to the numbers cited in that Times Picayune article, and referenced by ThinkProgress, he had 254 usable school buses. The question, then, is - did he use them? The now-famous AP photo suggests that he did not. It shows a large number of school buses parked in neat formation in a flooded parking lot. That parking lot, it turns out, is about a mile from the Superdome.... The fact is, the official evacuation plan for New Orleans stated that the city was to mobilize its school and transit buses to evacuate people from the city in advance of a major hurricane. The city failed to do so. The fact is, the official evacuation plan for southeastern Louisiana stated that transit and school buses were to be used to evacuate people in advance of a major hurricane. The state failed to do so. Santorum is absolutely correct.

As for the Globe report that FEMA only sent 100 buses when the Louisiana National Guard requested 700, consider it closely. When did the LNG ask FEMA for the buses? "On Sunday, the day before the storm..." It is not all that surprising that FEMA could not move 750 buses to New Orleans on such short notice. It is rather remarkable they were able to get 100 buses there that quickly. Why did the Louisiana National Guard wait until, essentially, the last minute to request FEMA to send buses? Perhaps they were waiting for New Orleans and the state to implement its own evacuation plan, which stipulated that city transit and school buses would be used to evacuate the city's poorest residents. Or perhaps they were waiting for an order from Gov. Blanco. She, after all, is the commander of the Louisiana National Guard.... If - as it seems clear - Nagin and Blanco weren't intending to implement the official evacuation plan to use city transit and school buses, the next logical question then is why did Blanco wait until the last minute to ask FEMA to send buses?

I have not seen it in print, so I can't provide a link, but I heard Nagin say the reason he asked FEMA for Greyhound busses rather than using the school buses and transit buses at his disposal was that the Greyhound buses had more comfortable seats. He was content to leave people in the Superdome for days without food or water (which the Red Cross wanted to deliver), and force them to wait for a bus with comfortable seats.

.... B. Preston at JunkyardBlog has more on the unused buses here. He also debunks a MediaMatters attempt at spinning away the bus story here, and reports on Nagin being grilled by Tim Russert about the buses here.

Preston has done most of the hard digging on the bus story and calculates that New Orleans had a total of 569 usable transit and school buses before Katrina hit. If they'd used 500 of them to transport people out before the storm hit, at a conservative 50 passengers per bus, they could have evacuated 25,000 people per trip. That was the official plan. But the officials didn't implement the plan.