Look familiar? By now you’ve probably seen this image on the news, the daily show and convservative websites. To many people, it proves that mayor Nagin was incompetant, for not using these buses to evacuate people from the city.
Here’s what Nagin had to say on Meet the Press:
Sure, here was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans.
The second point is that during the evacuation the highways were all running both sides out of town (technical term, “contra-flow”). The buses might have been able to ferry about 10,000 people out of town with appropriate drivers, but they couldn’t come back. More than 30k people were stranded at the Superdome, 25k at the Convention Center, and more around town.