Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: New Orleans- Bagdad Redux

Buses and overkill
Tom Brosz — (archived)

You know, believe it or not, I thing the right has gone overboard with that "bus" thing.

You can make a case that maybe the buses could have been used, but then you have to deal with a few real-world questions:

Do the buses have communications systems that work when cell phones don't? Where are your drivers? Have they had civil defense training? Is part of a school bus driver's job understood to be that they will leave home and family in the teeth of a storm and drive evacuees? Do they get paid extra for this? How about city bus drivers?

You could make a case that maybe New Orleans should have developed such a training and operations program involving bus drivers, but the more I look at it the more unrealistic it is to assume one could take a normal city and school bus system and activate it to the point where you could make it into a coordinated evacuation system on the fly.

Believe it or not, I think Nagin is getting a bum rap when people ask him why he just didn't use all the buses.

Hindsight extraordinaire, again. Like the guy who said we should have stationed helicopters and sandbags near the levees to be ready to plug them. Okay, sandbags, maybe, if you are smart enough to leave them on a hill, but I ask anyone familiar with helicopters: Where do you station a helicopter in a hurricane target zone and still be sure you're going to have a helicopter after the storm passes?

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