New Orleans

This would be laughably pathetic if it weren’t so actually pathetic…

Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay.


Let’s review two of the many abysmal decisions made by Ray Nagin in the days leading up to and in the months since Katrina…

Screw up #1: in what may prove to be the single greatest example of disastrous leadership judgment since the CEO of Coca-Cola went with New Coke, the mayor of New Orleans, Ray “chocolate city” Nagin, elected not to use the city’s 260 school buses, or the 364 NORTA buses, to evacuate the stranded residents of his city who lay helplessly for days in the path of a category 5 hurricane. (I never heard anyone suggest this but surely somebody did, only to have been vetoed by Nagin no doubt: In the days leading up to landfall of Katrina, why didn’t Ray Nagin recruit willing bus drivers (there were hundreds), have them run their normal school-day pick-up routes, over and over, collecting any people plus one piece of luggage who needed a ride out of the city, and deposit them somewhere, anywhere North, away from direct harm? I cannot be convinced that 624 school/city buses, operating around the clock for 4-5 days, shuttling the huddled masses out of the city, could not have easily removed every single resident that wanted to be removed from the path of Katrina.)
Ray Nagin’s negligence boggles the mind!

Screw up #2: A scrap metal company out of Texas offered to pay the city of N.O. 5 million dollars for the right to clean up all the abandoned vehicles from the flooded sections of N.O. that litter the streets and hinder clean-up efforts. Predictably, the mayor of “Brown Town” (his words, not mine) passed on the deal, instead shrewdly negotiating for the city of N.O. to pay 23 million dollars to have the vehicles removed by a different company. That Ray, he’s a slick customer. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on him.

The obvious question here is where were the keys to all these vehicles in the days before Katrina and why didn’t the helpless, downtrodden les miserables of N.O. drive their own cars out of the city? My guess: all those vehicles had Breathalyzer locks on the ignitions and since everybody attended pre-Katrina parties, nobody could get their blood alcohol content low enough to start the cars in time to escape the flood water.

What a satisfyingly ironic conclusion to the whole school bus affair: The school buses (the best resource, by far, for rescuing thousands of citizens) weren’t good enough to save his people from disaster, but are the only resource now available to rescue the schools at which the children of the people he could have rescued will hopefully be educated.

All you can do is shake your head and laugh at what miserable, abject, derelict failures the leaders of that city were when its residents needed them most. Astonishingly, they want to be re-elected. And just in time for hurricane season. Yaaaay!