"NO MORE CALLS FOR BUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
That’s what one of LA Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s aides emailed to staff on August 31, 2005. At that moment, thousands of people were stranded in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose.
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.”
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. His staff for the next several hours instead turned their attention to other matters, such as trying to get generators for emergency centers hit by the storm.
But later that afternoon the focus again turned to how to get people out of New Orleans. “The governor turned to me and said, ‘Where are the buses, where are the buses?’ ” Bromell recalled, saying Blanco told him to start getting buses again. At that point, the push became more aggressive, with Blanco later that evening issuing an executive order allowing the state to commandeer local government’s school buses.
Are they referring to these buses? They were in a lot in New Orleans; the city owned them.
Because they don’t seem to have been used—this photo went out days after August 31.
The Times-Picayune asks the right question regarding who did and didn’t do what as New Orleans drowned:
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.
They jumped all right, but not into action. They jumped into the blame game. They went out and dug up James Lee Witt and they got their national Democrat allies to start spinning the politics of the storm. It was on Sept 1 that Nagin gave his infamous and profane radio interview blaming Bush for the debacle. Meanwhile, the buses of New Orleans sat there in half a dozen lots around the city, some less than a mile from the Superdome where thousands were stranded. The buses flooded and became inoperable. Blanco and Nagin pivoted to blame FEMA and Bush, hoping to cover up their own failure, once the magnitude of their multiple blunders became apparent.
Look, this storm created a gigantic zone of destruction that ranged from New Orleans to Florida. Some confusion in the response to a disaster of this magnitude is to be expected, at all levels. What I find unacceptable is Blanco and Nagin’s response. They failed to prepare, then failed to use all available resources to evacuate, then failed to respond adequately, then allowed their own governing structures to collapse, then encouraged looting, then spread rumors of rampant lawlessness, then blamed it all on Bush and used their national Democrat allies to help ratchet up that blame. When it counted most, Blanco and Nagin not only failed to step up and lead, they helped create a monstrous myth to cover for their own incompetence.
(thanks to Chris and Michelle Malkin)