The mayor of New Orleans called for the city to be evacuated before the storm. They had a few hundred of these buses and they had drivers on the city payroll, but failed to use them. Now the buses are just more lost assets and many thousands of people that could have been evacuated are either dead or marooned in that flooded city.

Exactly. Now he's trying to get the attention away from him self. Everyone is at fault. I would have thought that these things are PREPLANNED but obviously not.

Govt. was warned many time that this was going to happen. They should have atleast have had evacuation plans.

Sadly.. I doubt no ones going to be fired for this mess either.

The mayor is black, too. Obviously its just that classic black laziness.

Lazy? No, I read that he was a businessman before entering politics as a reformer.

I don't know why you think it could be laziness. I would say it does show incompetence.

Maybe they were just hoping that the storm would just blow over like previous storms? But then why call for the evacuation of the city if you think it will blow over without much real damage? If you are going to evacuate the city, then why ignore such mass transportation systems for moving people out of the city?

The laziness thing was sarcasm.

I heard on the news that when a hurricane alert is issued, 5 out of 6 people will not even see the hurricane, there has been several warnings in recent times issued for the New Orleand area and nothing came of it. It was kind of a "boy who cried wolf" scenario where people just werent expecting it to be as bad as it was. And that being said, the hurricane WASN'T has bad as people had thought, it was just the flooding that no one expected that did the real damage. People should have evacuated, yes, but there are legitimate reasons that they didn't.

That point was not lost on me.

I had to point out that "laziness", black or otherwise, had nothing to do with the incident. Quite frankly though I wonder why you had to bring race into this thread. I did not think it was relevant here.

I think you are one of the hypersensitive PC "fluffies". If the mayor was white, you would likely have joined the chorus in tearing him up with criticism. But because he is black, you are trying to make excuses.

The mayor gave orders to evacuate the city. Yes, some people did not leave because they thought the storm would pass. But there were several thousand people being herded into the Superdome because they did not have transportation. Those school buses could have been used to get them farther inland.

Yeah, I'm a PC Fluffy. PANDA that ass.

In the future people will probably take huricane evacuations more seriously, but in the meantime its sad that those buses cant be used. Mayor Nagin is complaining about the lack of buses being used to move people out of the city

CNN interview

ROBINETTE: What do you need right now to get control of this situation?

NAGIN: I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound busline in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.

I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people over at the convention center. It's bursting at the seams. The poor people in Plaquemines Parish. They're air-vacing people over here in New Orleans. We don't have anything and we're sharing with our brothers in Plaquemines Parish.

It's awful down here, man.

Because he was "tired" of the argument... lol

there was a 3 day warning of the fact it was comming....

everyone with a TV or Radio should have known 3 days in advance it was comming and escaped. Screw possessions, screw material wealth, just get the hell out of there.

The police/army should have been controlling the flow of traffic so that it may be slow, but with three days to travel, then you'll get a hell of a distance.

the failure to use school busses will probably be shown up to be a fiscal decision and will cost the mayor his job.

Neon

The army is a little busy right now, what with a war on and all. The police were busy too what with NOLA having such a high crime-rate and all. And neither of those things would change the fact that people had no where to go if they were to get out of the city, nor the fact that they'd lived through hurricanes before, nor the fact that nobody knew the levies were going to break.

This hurricane was bigger than all the others on record. The people were told to evacuate before the storm.