No way to get people out before Katrina hit?

Been reading other blogs today about Katrina. Thanks to a tip from Tom McMahon's blog, I followed his link to this story, and this picture... I had seen this on the news... as I was wondering why they did not have busloads of people being taken out of at LEAST the below sea level area of New Orleans... seems that there may not be any good reason for not providing transportation for the poor who had no way out...

From junkyardblog.net
Sorry, I don't know how to link or trackback.... there is more to the post at the website.

Reader Eric sent us this photo last night. It's a higher-res update of the infamous Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool. Note the oil slick streaming from the bus engines:

With the improved resolution we count 255 buses in that one lot. That means at a capacity of 66 on board, 16,830 New Orleans residents could have been evacced out in one trip. Even if you have a lower capacity per bus, say 50 per bus, you're still getting nearly 13,000 out in one run. In an emergency mandatory evacuation, you could probably get away with putting more than 66 on each of those buses.

When we said that the buses are now expenses instead of assets, this is what we meant. Not only are those buses ruined, their disuse resulting in lives lost, but now they're spilling oil and gas out into the already polluted water. A spark near that slick could cause yet another fire and a whole new set of explosions.

It appears another small school bus lot in New Orleans sat unused too. It's in this NOAA image. Here's a cropped detail:

Looks like 13 buses there. That's enough transportation to get another 500-1000 people out of town before the storm hit.

There may be more evacuation resources sitting out there if anyone wants to keep digging using the raw images or Google Earth. For instance, there were at least a few airport buses sitting at the closed airport.