School Buses
Photograph purportedly shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot because no one ordered them to be deployed to evacuate residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina.
- Published 6 September 2005
Claim
Photograph shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot because no one ordered them to be deployed to evacuate residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina.
The next time you are forced to listen to someone try to blame the lack of help for New Orleans on our Federal Government show them this.
Then ask them why the local Mayor and/or Governor did not deploy these buses August 27 and 28 to help those who could not afford to get out. I am worn out listening to that blowhard mayor (who saw to it that friends were given special leeway to evacuate the Superdome before many of the sick and elderly) and his cronies complain that the President hasn't done enough. And, while your at it, remind the whiners that the majority of the suffering taking place now is a direct result of most of those people not leaving the city last Sunday. I understand that there were some people who couldn't leave for various reasons (such as folks in nursing homes who were only evacuated Saturday), but for the majority of these folks, they would not be in the predicament they are in now If they had simply left. These buses are testimony to the fact that much more could have been done before things progressed to the point they are now.
It is not the Federal Government's (and consequently, the President) fault those people did not leave.
There. I feel better now. Collected via the Internet, 2005
Rating
Mixture
About this ratingWhat's True
Photograph shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot.
What's False
The buses didn't sit in a parking lot because no one thought to use them to evacuate residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina.
Origin
The photo verification part of this item is simple enough: The image of school buses in a flooded parking lot displayed above was taken in
That this photograph represents a bungled opportunity to have evacuated a substantial number of New Orleans residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina is not supported by evidence. Such a claim presumes an availability of resources (e.g., experienced drivers, fuel) and workable logistics (e.g., sufficient means of notifying and getting residents to departure points, sufficiently clear roads for multiple trips out of town and back, adequate facilities within a reasonable driving distance capable of providing shelter, food, and water to a large number of people for an indeterminate period of time on short notice) that may or may not have been present. (There’s no guarantee that all the buses shown in this picture were even in working condition.) And, given the particular geography of
More important, residents of New Orleans received no pre-Katrina warning from federal or state officials, nor from hurricane or engineering experts, that the city’s leveescould breach and fail. They weren’t looking to jump aboard buses and evacuate because they thought they were relatively safe; they didn’t anticipate that levee construction problems would end up destroying their homes and lives.
Some opportunities like the one posited here might have been missed in
