First - were there enough buses to collect that many people in the first place? Let's lower the ante by saying 20% of that 100K are willful idiots who refused to leave. That's a gross simplification, but we'll stick with it. So, how many buses does it take to move 80,000 people out? Depends on how many people fit on a bus. Let's say 50 people per bus on average. That's 1600 bus trips. How many buses were in NO on Saturday AM? 1600? 800? 500? I don't know. I'm asking for real numbers, not guesstimates based on pictures on Yahoo. One way to calculate it would be to see how many trips it is taking now to move people.

Second - Collection. Here's maybe a little easier problem to solve. Drive up and down the streets calling for people to come out and get on the bus, I've heard said. How do you ensure families aren't split up? Might that result in less than full loads of people? How do you coordinate loading the buses? Look at how many difficulties they are having right now getting people onto buses when they A) are in one place and B) want like h*ll to get out of there. I'm not saying it is impossible; I'm saying look at the problem realistically.

Third - Delivery. Here's the most difficult part. Where was Mayor Nagin supposed to send these people? Unless you wish to argue that they should have been dropped off at the side of a ditch somewhere in western LA, then they needed to go to receiving shelters. Where were there receiving shelters for 80,000 people?  Most places within a reasonable driving distance were already filled. Read the news articles on the size of Baton Rouge right now, for example. Houston can't take everyone, nor can the other major cities of east Texas absorb all of them. And this is days after the storm has passed, days in which planning could take place, days for municipalities, churches, and private citizens to offer shelter.

Given the condition of the freeways, it is unlikely that any bus in NO could have done more than one trip to a real shelter that had space before the storm hit. Should trips have been attempted anyway? Yes, but only if the bus was going to a guaranteed shelter. So, you tell me - where were these people supposed to go once loaded onto those buses?

This doesn't relieve Mayor Nagin or Gov. Blanco of responsibility. They will face the music come election time, if not sooner. But my point is that there is no "just load people on buses"  in this situation.  Tens of thousands of people needed to be moved long distances to many locations. The mayor of a city cannot simply order other mayors to accept busloads of people - it has to be negotiated. The governor of a state has no authority to send thousands of her citizens to another state, with no consideration of the services and capacities of that other state.  The mayors and governors of the receiving locations have their own people to take care of first.  Maybe you can take a chance and ship a few hundred, may even a thousand or two, people off and trust that someone on the other end will catch them, that they will not be allowed to fall. But you can't do that with tens of thousands.

Then there is the ugly truth that people don't want to really talk about. No city administrator in his or her right mind wants thousands of impoverished people deposited on their doorstep, particularly not when these people are probably going to stay a good long while, indeed, may never leave. Toss in a heaping scoop of racisim, and dust the top with suspicion of strangers and (as Emeril would say)  BAM! It all gets kicked up a notch.

Mayor Nagin probably should have had a plan to get the poor and carless onto some kind of transport (remember, no trains, no planes)  and get them out of NO. But he had just as great an obligation not to dump these people. Frankly, hindsight's better than foresight by a damn sight, and when I heard that the Superdome was going to be opened as a shelter against the storm for those who couldn't get out, I thought it was a pretty darn good idea from where I sit.  I assumed that they would be kept safe inside the structure, as they would not be in their homes, and that, once the storm passed the National Guard would drive in, secure the city, and help transport these people out of there as shelters in other locations were opened, all of it based on an evaluation of how bad the storm damage was.

The role of FEMA in this was to support the city and state efforts to move massive numbers of people to safety and to provide immediate support the second the winds died down enough for the National Guard to get in there.  Tell me what is so wrong about gathering people at the Superdome for a day or two and then sending them out in an orderly manner? The Superdome itself was not adequately prepared - and the responsibility for this needs to be established - but the basic idea was reasonable.

As far as I can tell, FEMA was not there to provide the regional/cross-state organization to operate in the aftermath of a massive storm that was guaranteed at the least to knock out all services and power across much of LA (MS and AL, too, I hasten to add) and place regular first responders under great stress. FEMA's job, in part, is to make sure that local populations are not left to the mercy of less than stellar local elected officials. And, be fair - the point of FEMA is to provide emergency response expertise so that local officials do not need to become experts themselves.

Maybe the citizens of New Orleans should have elected a mayor who was such an expert. Maybe the governership of any state should only be filled by someone certified as competant in handling massive natual disasters. But what cannot be gainsayed is that the President of the United States MUST appoint a head of FEMA who is such a person.

And he did not. 

From the lack of that nail, a shoe was lost. From lack of that shoe, the horse was lost. And so on...