I posted earlier on how Nagin and Blanco made some abysmal decisions early on which assumed the city’s levees would weather the storm. This was not necessarily wrong, until of course they did fail and they never adjusted their responses.

Nagin called for evacuations way too late and did not full evacuate people beyond the Superdome even after the levees began to fail and would take nearly 24 hours to crest. No one needs to mention the infamous busses and the idiotic decision to let them be swamped instead of used.

Blanco disallowed Red Cross supplies getting to the Superdome before the levees failed in fear people would overstay their welcome. She too did not change her position after the levees began to fail and it was clear 30,000-50,000 people were going to get stranded in the center of New Orleans.

This was not Michael Brown’s or FEMA’s fault. But the media-formally-known-as-mainstream had the intention of laying Katrina on Bush. Now we find out the bus fiasco was even worse than anyone initially thought. Wizbang (via The Anchoress) has this stunning revelation on another group of busses at Nagin’s disposal, high and dry and minutes from the Superdome:

On the right is the OTHER Orleans Parish bus barn (the Algiers Bus Barn at 801 Patterson Ave. [Document Link]), less than 5 miles from the Superdome. These buses never flooded and the route from there to the Convention Center and the Superdome was open the whole time.

This is criminal. Nagin and Blanco had hundreds of busses at two locations at their disposal prior to the hurricane to get people out of harms way. Those busses were still available for use once the levees broke. And this new fleet of busses was ALWAYS available. Nagin should be brought up on charges of criminal negligence. While the death tool is under 1,000, many of those could have been saved if people had not been stranded in the Superdome and Convention Center.

And the principle of a cascading failure still applies. When Nagin and Blanco screwed up and needed help dealing with 50,000 stranded people they took resources from other areas hit by Katrina. Their mistakes rippled through out the Katrina effort.

And then you have the Nagin idiocy of asking people to come into an unsafe, unhealthy city. A city now with half the cityu workers it once had to pick up the trash, police the streets, man the fire stations, and process aid….

Somebody needs to get Nagin out of New Orleans before he finishes off what Katrina started

UPDATE:

Check out Rusty’s excellent sleuthing on this, which shows the busses evacuating people from the area they were stored, only to be parked and unused while people suffered in the Superdome.