Mark Steyn just wrote about
"an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one
(New Orleans) city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline
into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan
Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which
meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have
ferried out 16,830 people. ... New Orleans had more than
enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost
everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.
Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order.
OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows
with the public schools transportation department, or the
guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus
drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these
were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it
to themselves. ... So the first school bus to escape New
Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had
been abandoned on a city street." |
