Apparently Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans, didn’t think school buses were good enough to evacuate citizens:
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin garnered a ton of publicity with a profanity-laced interview he gave to WWL radio last Thursday, where he blasted President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco for not coming to rescue his city in time.
However, Nagin’s most newsworthy comments - where he explained why he didn’t use hundreds of city school buses to evacuate his city’s flood victims - went almost unnoticed.
Turns out, Nagin turned his nose up at the yellow buses, demanding more comfortable Greyhound coaches instead.
“I need 500 buses, man,” he told WWL. “One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here.”
Nagin described his response:
“I’m like - you’ve got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.”
While Nagin was waiting for his Greyhound fleet, Katrina’s floodwaters swamped his school buses, rendering them unusable.
As we get deeper and deeper into the whys and hows of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina, we’re going to discover that the local and state authorities were totally incompetent, bordering on criminally negligent. How can anyone justify refusing to evacuate the elderly and sick because you want better vehicles than the ones you have immediately available?
People like Jesse Jackson can wail and moan all they want about how the government’s response to this situation was racist, but the fact remains that the person most responsible for the deaths from flooding in New Orleans is the mayor, who happens to be black.
September 8th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Mind if I point out that in addition to about 500 schol buses, New Orleans Transit runs over 350? Bigger, air-conditioned, vastly more comfortable, safer, more powerful engines, tires that “put more tread on the road”… Where are those buses?