Updating my earlier post, the WaPo has corrected their article, now saying that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26th, which was the Friday before Katrina actually hit on Monday the 29th. (HT: Mannish.)
However, it looks like Mayor Ray Nagin deserves more blame than I thought.
Then on Sunday morning, when I checked in again with local NO bloggers and local NO news sites, I again saw no mention of Nagin's behavior. The I watched Nagin's TV interview and I saw how the local news media was too cowardly to confront him about his doing nothing - and I mean absolutely, nothing - to get the poor and the sick and the physically incapacitated OUT of the city when the city was projected to be either totally destroyed or completely flooded with water.I also watched as local reporters were too afraid to contradict him when he claimed - and this was at the time the then Category 5 was projected to directly hit the city - that in just two weeks - all the water would be pumped out and all the utilities would be back!
Again, not one person anywhere in the MSM said... anything... about this lie, then or since.
I then watched as the news media again said... nothing... as Nagin claimed on TV that the flood waters after the hurricane would NOT be toxic. At that point, I belatedly started blogging non-stop (unaware of Brendan and the handful of others pre-existing efforts), asking - doesn't anyone out there realize that the mayor of New Orleans.... is crazy?
B. Preston at Junk Yard Blog has more pictures of school buses left to the flood rather than used by Mayor Nagin to evacuate his citizens.
With the improved resolution we count 255 buses in that one lot. That means at a capacity of 66 on board, 16,830 New Orleans residents could have been evacced out in one trip. Even if you have a lower capacity per bus, say 50 per bus, you're still getting nearly 13,000 out in one run. In an emergency mandatory evacuation, you could probably get away with putting more than 66 on each of those buses.When we said that the buses are now expenses instead of assets, this is what we meant. Not only are those buses ruined, their disuse resulting in lives lost, but now they're spilling oil and gas out into the already polluted water. A spark near that slick could cause yet another fire and a whole new set of explosions.
(HT: Clayton Cramer.)
