by hilzoy
I swear: you can't make this stuff up. Via dKos, this story:
"Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes.On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.
Even after levees broke and residents were crowding the Louisiana Superdome, then-FEMA Director Mike Brown was bent on using his own buses to evacuate New Orleans, Blanco said. (...)
Blanco took over more buses from Louisiana school systems and sent them in on Wednesday, two days after the storm. She tapped the National Guard to drive them. Each time the buses emptied an area, more people would appear, she said.
The buses took 15,728 people to safety, a Blanco aide said. But the state's fleet of school buses wasn't enough. On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.
"I said, 'Even if we had 500 buses, they've underestimated the magnitude of this situation, and I think I need 5,000 buses, not 500,'" Blanco recounted.
"'But, Andy, those 500 are not here,'" the governor said.
Card promised to get Blanco more buses.
Later Wednesday night, Blanco walked into the State Police Communications Center and asked if anyone knew anything about the buses.
An officer told her the buses were just entering the state.
"I said, 'Do you mean as in North Louisiana, which is another six hours from New Orleans?,'" Blanco recalled in the interview. "He said, 'Yes, m'am.'"
It was at that point, Blanco said, that she realized she had made a critical error. (...)
"I had security in the knowledge that there were 500 buses," she said. "Mike had emphasized the buses to me personally. That was not my first concern until I realized that they were not there."
Meanwhile, the state continued to send school buses into the affected areas.
One of Blanco's aides, Leonard Kleinpeter, said FEMA told him at one point that the state could stop sending school buses because the agency was going to bring in helicopters and use them instead of the commercial buses that still weren't there.
Blanco told Kleinpeter to ignore those instructions.
"She said, 'I'll be damned. You keep loading the wagons on the school buses,'" Kleinpeter said.
Kleinpeter said he now wonders if FEMA temporarily halted its buses because the agency thought helicopters would work better."
Brown told Blanco not to use school buses, which were in Louisiana, because they were not air-conditioned?? FEMA thought that they were going to evacuate tens of thousands of people using helicopters??
Reality: it's the new parody.
Actually, the old parody is still alive and well.
Posted by: hilzoy | September 19, 2005 at 11:20 PM
If I didn't note that I have a lot of thoughts swirling around this stuff, someone would probably smack me. So consider it said, please.
Posted by: Gary Farber | September 19, 2005 at 11:39 PM
Oh, certain parts of Louisiana are closer to the Gulf coast than other parts! Well, you can't blame Brown for getting a little discombobulated on that point; he was learning on the job, after all. Next time maybe she'd like to TELL the FEMA director which part of Louisiana is most likely to be affected by hurricanes? They don't have any information of that kind, after all.
Posted by: Cryptic Ned | September 20, 2005 at 12:02 AM
but of course if the Mayor had found 200 off duty bus drivers and enough gasoline to take those 200 NO school buses to higher ground, they could have saved another couple thousand people. What? They didn't have air conditioning either? Fancy that.
Posted by: hrc | September 20, 2005 at 12:13 AM
The don't have A/C, so they are too unsuitable for life-saving. What, then, exactly is an A/C-less bus good for in Louisiana? Why should kids on the way to class have to sweat, but people who will die without a ride out of town shouldn't be forced to suffer the indignity of sweating on the life saving bus. Arrrr!
Posted by: lex icon | September 20, 2005 at 12:56 AM
but of course if the Mayor had found 200 off duty bus drivers and enough gasoline to take those 200 NO school buses to higher ground, they could have saved another couple thousand people.
That is assuming that 2000 people died in N.O., which we still dont know.
FEMA thought that they were going to evacuate tens of thousands of people using helicopters??
(lost my link,out of practice, this was in Wash Post.)FEMA may not have rescued 10's of 1000's of people using helicopters, but between the Coast Guard, Natl Guard, etc, then over 10,000 people actually were rescued by helicopter.
Posted by: DaveC | September 20, 2005 at 02:03 AM
What, then, exactly is an A/C-less bus good for in Louisiana?
Exactly what I was thinking.
Posted by: Thad | September 20, 2005 at 02:14 AM
I meant saved in the sense that they could have tranported another couple thousand people out of town in a more expeditious manner, and probably "saved" a few of those from death in the process. Sorry for the imprecise choice of language.
Posted by: hrc | September 20, 2005 at 02:56 AM
I sense the hand of Minderbinder Enterprises in all this.
Posted by: Saiyuk | September 20, 2005 at 04:29 AM
The school bus issue is an interesting one, especially when we see people give us the 'math' to "prove" how feckless local and state officials were.
This mediamatters link argues that the number of buses has been far overestimated. One problems with their math is that New Orleans is not simply Orleans parish, but given the news stories of the Gretna police blocking entry, it is difficult to imagine them jumping in their district's buses to pick people up out of the Superdome.
Gary was earlier asking about whether people were choppered out or bussed out of the Convention center, because I thought that most of the convention center people were helicoptered out. Reading the post, I may have gotten that impression from FEMA if they felt that everyone should have been choppered out of the city.
Obviously, the picture of the flooded buses is an attention grabber, and here at Mark Kleiman's blog is the infamous picture. Counting the buses, there seems to be about 220 in the picture, and this blog post has the same location from an overhead camera, saying that there are 255 so comments that there were 2,000 available buses sounds like 10 fold error.
Louisiana also has a school choice law, passed in 95 and updated in 97. One of the side effects of school choice laws is that busing is reduced, so the mediamatter's point about 30 buses being broken down in 2003 might suggest that this number were higher 2 years later.
Some other considerations are listed here, which is notable because it is embedded in a retraction, something you don't see much of these days...
We really can't say much because we have no idea how many flights were made, where people were taken, etc, etc. For example, DaveC notes that over 20,000 people were saved by helicopter. However, from the stories, the helicopters were flying over, picking up people off roofs and dropping them on high ground and then returning to get more. This is why so many children were separated from their parents, because the choppers would often take the children, and were assuming that the parents would be picked up later and brought to the same rendevous point. This makes sense if you figure that an adult has a better chance of avoiding drowning than a child. At any rate, choppering them out in this way is quite different from a plan that would take those people to relocation centers or even to the airport.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is really interested in trying to piece together how many flights, how many bus rids, etc that were actually done, though that is needed, not simply to decide among competing narratives, but to figure out what to do the next time.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 07:53 AM
Hey, Dave C. is back and looks in one piece.
Very good!
Posted by: John Thullen | September 20, 2005 at 09:25 AM
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is really interested in trying to piece together how many flights, how many bus rids, etc that were actually done, though that is needed, not simply to decide among competing narratives, but to figure out what to do the next time.
I fear this is true, which is a cryin' shame. As it is, I think too many people invested too much in their initial reactions, leading to overcommitment in blame and finger-pointing (whether at President Bush or FEMA or Michael Brown or Gov. Blanco or Mayor Nagin). With so much political capital sunk in personal egos and punditry reputations, who's gonna be interested in pursuing the truth, especially if it means people have to eat crow?
(see, I can make a short comment from time to time.)
Posted by: slarrow | September 20, 2005 at 10:21 AM
slarrow: ... who's gonna be interested in pursuing the truth ... ?
There are of course those of us who like to know actual facts, even if only for our own selfish intellectual reasons.
How do you propose these facts be brought to light? Any investigation will of course be politically tainted. That is the nature of investigations into political disasters.
As far as I can tell, the only chance is to make as much noise as possible so that politicians are sufficiently threatened. They may then make the calculation that stonewalling is worse (i.e., more likely to lose them an election) than letting out the facts. Even then they will seek to minimize the damage by selective release of information or application of spin.
The one thing I am sure will not work is to shut up.
Posted by: ral | September 20, 2005 at 11:27 AM
Transcript of radio interview with New Orleans' Nagin:
(emphasis added.)So was Nagin turning his nose up at the buses, or just the drivers? I'm not sure. He said later:
The only reason I can think for not letting the evacuees themselves drive the buses is that they're not licensed to do so. Or maybe someone thinks they'll steal the bus instead of taking it where it's supposed to go. Both of those are minor problems, though.Posted by: Kyle Hasselbacher | September 20, 2005 at 11:49 AM
You know, I read that full article hilzoy cited, and there are a few bits in there that made me just a little put out with Governor Blanco. The first bit was where she lashed out at Brown for expecting specifics of what she needed.
"Specific things, my God," she said. "(If) they didn't know that we were in the middle of search and rescue and needed to evacuate people, then they were not on the ground with us. We needed buses and helicopters."
Um...what exactly did she think her job was again? (Couldn't be to give people a detailed road map since she purportedly knew her state better than the feds did, could it?)
As for responsibility, she also said,
Blanco is less emphatic in taking blame for the breakdown.
She said she takes responsibility "for assuming that help was on the way" when it wasn't.
Blanco said she's also learned a lesson.
"In the end, in a really dangerous, life-threatening situation, there is no army that's going to be there to save you...."
Ye gods, this woman was in charge of her state? Did she really think her job was to scream for help and then complain when it didn't show up where and when she wanted it to?
This, to my mind, is indeed another example of incompetence. But this woman was put into place by the people of Louisiana. That suggests to me that they didn't have a nightmare hurricane situation in mind when they elected someone already considered "deliberate" (or "indecisive", pick your side.) Makes me wonder if every candidate in the next election is going to get quizzed on disaster preparedness--and face the consequences if the answers don't satisfy (a la ral's observation.)
Posted by: slarrow | September 20, 2005 at 02:16 PM
I try to visit once a day and read your posts and comments. It's become harder and harder. Since Moe released his grasp on the moderate left, Hilzoy has dragged you to the fringe. You take horribly difficult issues, pull a snapshot out of context and shake it like a knotted sock; gleefully sharing the hate in your hearts. Who are the buses transfering - the infirm. What happens in non airconditioned buses stuck in gridlock for hours - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/national/nationalspecial/18frail.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=477d062beda215df&hp&ex=1127102400&partner=homepage>death.
"Dr. Hawes and her colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are seeking funds to study the long-term effects on Katrina's nursing-home evacuees. She said that in the past nursing home patients had died on non-air-conditioned buses during evacuations, and that patients seemed to fare the best if they were evacuated along with others they knew, including longstanding roommates and familiar aides."
I rarely agree with Hilzoy, but have always respected her ability to appear to be above the fray. No longer.
Posted by: blogbudsman | September 20, 2005 at 03:26 PM
Did she really think her job was to scream for help and then complain when it didn't show up where and when she wanted it to?
Gee, when you put it that way, I guess you're right. Isn't that just like a woman?
Posted by: Paul | September 20, 2005 at 03:32 PM
Blogbudsman: Who are the buses transfering - the infirm. What happens in non airconditioned buses stuck in gridlock for hours - death
What happens if you can't walk and can't swim and you're trapped in the path of rising floodwater? Death.
As the very article you linked to pointed out, of the nursing home residents evacuated by bus:
Yes, of course it would have been better if FEMA had got its act together and managed to supply proper transportation for all nursing home residents to safe space outside Louisiana. And, given the choice between a chance of death in an unairconditioned bus to an unfamiliar space, and the chance of death from Hurricane Katrina, one can see why some nursing-home owners hesitated and decided not to evacuate. Had FEMA done its job properly... but we already know they didn't.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | September 20, 2005 at 03:46 PM
Kyle, most of the people left behind didn't have cars, so I suspect that few were competent to drive a bus. I certainly wouldn't want to be evacuated in a bus driven by someone who'd never driven a bus before and perhaps hadn't driven a car that often. That's not a minor problem, and it makes weighing the relative risks of death and injury between going and staying more difficult.
Posted by: KCinDC | September 20, 2005 at 06:24 PM
The only reason I can think for not letting the evacuees themselves drive the buses is that they're not licensed to do so.
I think it is important to understand why one wants buses to take people out. You do so in order to reduce the pressure within the city so first responders can deal with those who need help. As someone pointed out, in 9-11, the majority of New Yorkers walked out of the city. You evacuate people out so the Superdome floor doesn't get covered with human waste. You evacuate people out so you reduce the amount of food and supplies you have to bring in and you can concentrate on bringing more vital aid.
However, we now have to remember that one of the main exits from the city, that going thru Gretna, was blocked. Now, imagine if the call had gone out to anyone who had driven a rig (and , as KCinDC notes, it would be a big mistake to think that driving a bus is the same as driving your car) and they get stopped at the bridge crossing, what do you think would have happened?
I'm not saying that Nagin took that into account, but there are reasons why he specifically says '500 buses' and that relates apparently to what was promised him by FEMA. This isn't like Independence Day, where all the volunteers with flying experience are given jets to fight the aliens. (or the Battlefield Earth movie, where the illiterate man-animals teach themselves to fly Harriers in order to provide a deus ex machina)
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 07:13 PM
Kyle, most of the people left behind didn't have cars, so I suspect that few were competent to drive a bus.
I know that driving a bus is not the same as driving a car (my dad is licensed to drive a school bus, but I'm not). Nevertheless, an 18-year-old kid did it, and if I'd been stuck there, I'd have been happy to ride with him, but I can understand making the choice your way instead. Some people stayed not for lack of buses but because they couldn't take their pets with them, and I respect that decision too.
It's true that many of the Superdome refugees were not licensed (or competent) to drive at all, but do you think they outnumber the possible drivers by more than a ratio of passengers to drivers? Do you think the buses outnumbered the possible drivers?
David Brin has been all over this topic lately, and I'm sold: much as I want the government to do the heavy lifting (e.g., dropping literal tons of food and water and carrying masses to safety), I also want it to facilitate or at the very least get out of the way of people taking care of themselves and each other.
Posted by: Kyle Hasselbacher | September 20, 2005 at 08:44 PM
It's true that many of the Superdome refugees were not licensed (or competent) to drive at all, but do you think they outnumber the possible drivers by more than a ratio of passengers to drivers? Do you think the buses outnumbered the possible drivers?
Not picking on you, Kyle, but a single 18 year old driving a bus and picking up people on the road side is quite different than 500 of them in an organized pick up attempt (and I have read lots of outraged RW bloggers saying 'hey, they only had to make 4 round trips to Baton Rouge and there would have been no crisis!') I do think that we have been fooled by so many disaster movies where some untrained person jumps into the breech and saves everyone.
I love David Brin's books, but he is another one whose whole ouvre is based on the untrained leaping into the breech and coming up with out of the box solutions that those trained would have never seen. It makes for rousing fiction, but the distance between The Postman or even the Uplift series and Red Dawn is not so far.
I'd also note that Brin seems to be have little knowledge of the geography and politics of NOLA (his lumping of the various police departments in the greater NOLA area into 'the NO police' being an prime example of that) and doesn't seem to have made a full study of all of the things that were done/proposed/attempted and blocked. (to be fair, I don't know if anyone can, at this point in time, have a relatively complete overview. However, this should encourage caution in proposing theories, not justification)
For example, Brin writes:
Here’s just one example: Most of these people in NoLa had cell phones. The cell system collapsed, turning those phones into useless bricks. And yet, I have sketched a PEER-to-PEER concept that could overlay upon the existing cell network, that would continue working even when all the cell towers fail. (Three guesses; have I been able to get anybody interested?)
The temptation to for Brin to play ignored prophet is high, but becomes embarrassing when you read about people who try and get turned down
or actually setting these things up
Of course, the impulse to say 'I told you so' is probably the most pernicious and universal impulse, and everyone is subject to it. But if Brin can't step back from the views of his own fiction, where he can determine what time the asteroid hits, and enter the world where we don't know what happens when, he should be taken with several grains of salt.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 09:26 PM
Not picking on you, Kyle, but a single 18 year old driving a bus and picking up people on the road side is quite different than 500 of them in an organized pick up attempt
I'm really talking about organizing volunteers to drive whatever school buses were available. I don't think there were 500, but you're right, it's a different job. I think that just a few organizers could have picked drivers out of the crowd to drive the buses, but it's also possible I don't have a full appreciation of the chaos of the time.
The temptation to for Brin to play ignored prophet is high
I read the "I have a P2P phone solution" bit the same way you did.
And I haven't read any of Brin's fiction.
Anyway, I take to heart what you're saying about salt. I still think that Katrina's aftermath featured many many instances of authorities working against people who would have been able to help if they'd been allowed, and I think leaving buses to rust is one of them (though hardly the worst).
Posted by: Kyle Hasselbacher | September 20, 2005 at 10:20 PM
DHS said the buses were fine, just don't ask them what they wanted to use them for. . .
Posted by: Constant | September 20, 2005 at 11:52 PM
I haven't read any of Brin's fiction.
The Uplift series was a good read, the Postman, not so much.
While I don't think that authorities covered themselves with glory, this article about the MS coast authorities and what they did is rather interesting. Brin suggests that this is what _should_ have happened, yet it is telling the level of social dislocation necessary to create these conditions.
It could have been national policy to take the embryonic notion of "Smart Mobs" and enhance it, so that self organizing citizens might show what they can do, while the officials and professionals have their hands full
This takes the conclusion and turns it on its head. The point I would take away from this is that we have to do our damndest to make sure that this level of social dislocation does not occur. Decentralizing is a good thing, but this strikes me the same as a lot of libertarian thinking, in that there is a core of good notions, but when pushed to the extreme, lack any notion of common sense and balance.
On another point, this juxtaposition of two WaPo articles struck me as funny, in a dark sort of way
The first
the second
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 21, 2005 at 12:57 AM
The more relevant Brin book, and actually one of my all-time favorites that I need to reread, is Earth.
Posted by: Catsy | September 21, 2005 at 01:30 AM