Putting the New Orleans school buses in perspective
This has been updated after I learned just how many students and buses were in Orange Count Public Schools compared to Orleans Parish. I admit, I didn’t realize just how big OCPS was. Wow!
They had a whole fleet of school buses they could have used to evacuate everybody.
That’s all I hear from the FoxNews network. Over and over about how the school buses weren’t used and how that would have made all the difference in the world in New Orleans. How everyone could have been evacuated.
Um, I don’t think so.
People are making a bigger deal about the buses than they should. New Orleans and the surrounding area is smaller than Orange County, FL. Matter of fact Orleans Parish has less than 1/3 the total number of students than Orange County, FL. At least it did before Katrina.
Here’s the truth about school buses (the type in question):
A large school bus holds about 90 people if they sit three to a seat. That’s what the federal government tells the school districts when trying to figure how much to charge for the buses. They hold 90 people if they aren’t any bigger than most 3rd or 4th graders. From about 5th grade up you’re going to get 2 people to a seat at best. You’re down to about 60 to 70 people for a large bus.
Not all school buses are this big. In Orange County about 1/3 are that size. Most are your average size school bus which holds roughly 50 people. Short buses (yes, we have those) seat about 10.
Orange County moves about 63,000 students to and from school a day. However, not all of those students are on the buses at the same time. First high school students get picked up and dropped off. Then elementary. Then middle school. There are not enough buses to pick up that many students at one time. Forget about having enough drivers. Orange County Public Schools has 997 buses.
Let’s do the math. Now remember, Orleans Parish has less than 1/3 the number of students that Orange County, FL has therefore it has less than 1/3 of the buses. Let’s be generous and say that New Orleans has 300 average size buses. If each bus was loaded with 50 people that would be 15,000 people that could have been evacuated using the buses.
Buses are slow beasts and Baton Rouge could not have held all the evacuees from New Orleans. No matter what anyone wants to think, if there just wasn’t enough space. Baton Rouge was also not far enough away from New Orleans not to get hit with hurricane force winds. Therefore dumping the people in the street or leaving them on the buses would not be an option.
Again, though, let’s be generous and say that Baton Rouge could hold all those people. On a normal day it would take at least 90 minutes to drive from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. According to a fellow teacher at my school, it took some of her relatives at least 3 times that amount of time to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on the Saturday before Katrina struck. That’s 4 1/2 hours to Baton Rouge. At least.
If the buses were able to, they could turn around and get maybe one more load of people. That’s a huge if, but I’m trying to be generous here.
All together, maybe 30,000 people could have been evacuated using school buses. Maybe. Trust me, that’s being really, really generous. It’s also leaving at least 70,000 people stranded in New Orleans. At least.
Should the buses have been put into play? Sure.
All those buses, though, wouldn’t have been able to evacuate the entire city of New Orleans. It would have also been a logistic nightmare that would have severely hampered the ability of the buses to get even 15,000 people out of the area. Unless the mayor of New Orleans could rely on Black Magic to levitate the buses over the traffic and into multiple communities, they wouldn’t have made that big a difference.
If you still think 300 school buses could have evacuated all those people, think again. Buses from all over Louisiana and other states are being used to evacuate people. Even so, the buses need to take more than one trip.
And the evacuation continues.
sally:
School buses could have helped…but where would they go with all the evacuees? Would they be able to have enough gas to transport the people? Who would drive the school buses? They’re not like your regular car…they handle differently so not anyone with a drivers license can drive a school bus.
I guess the right is trying to find any excuse to minamize the inadequate, slow, disorganized federal response.
6 September 2005, 9:09 pmCecile:
Well, there is no doubt that the media has been helpful in this horrible situation. That being said, many media sources have served to further muddy the waters. I have chosen to limit my doses of the Fox News Network! The bus story along with others have annoyed me. Thank you for shedding light and bringing some perspective about the bus story. Hopefully America will see through this type of negative reporting. Let us continue to help our neighbors in any way we can.
7 September 2005, 8:42 amCSC5502D:
Ah, the truth comes out and here come the excuses for Nagin. Before I get started, I have to ask this. Nagin screams for buses, and it’s Bush’s fault they aren’t there, but all the buses Nagin already had wouldn’t matter? Liberal logic 101 folks!
Plus, I’m thinking that the people crammed into the Superdome by the MAYOR’s advice might have thought it better to have 30,000 LESS PEOPLE in it. Don’t you?
That whole “Baton Rouge couldn’t hold them all” crap is meaningless too. What’s better, sitting around in the path of the hurricane, or sitting several hours inland? Hmm, let me think.
By the way, if using the school buses is such a lame and useless idea, why is it part of the city’s own evacuation plan?
http://www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26
By the way, they’re now using SCHOOL BUSES FROM OUTSIDE THE STATE to help bring people out. Irony sucks, doesn’t it?
7 September 2005, 12:27 pmMarinade Dave:
Yesterday, a caller to the Philips Phile (for those outside Orlando, it is a syndicated FM radio talk show based here) asked why school buses weren’t used. My first thought was that these buses are filled with children when driving their daily routes and stopping at designated points. His idea was to have the parents and children go to these stops. Certainly the parents know where their children load and unload from their home stops. My question is how could you fill a bus with entire families when they are loaded with children every day? There would be no room for anyone else.
I never took into consideration that the same bus normally picks up children at different times of the day depending on what level school they are attending. Plus, the fact that they don’t move at a rapid pace. Even if they made constant runs to try to compensate for that, there would not be enough time in a day to evacuate an entire city of school children and their families. Where would they deliver all of these people? And what transportation would deal with it from there? Clearly, the Superdome couldn’t handle all of those people.
You’re right. If you take one bus per route out of the city, what happens to the other children who are to be picked up at a different time of day? Thanks for that enlightenment.
Unfortunately, too many people have simple solutions to very complex problems. Or so it seems.
7 September 2005, 1:48 pmmulligan:
CSC5502D,
Try reading what I actually wrote. I didn’t say that the buses Nagin had wouldn’t have mattered. I said that it would only have been able to help about 30,000 people not over 100,000. In other words, it would not have been enough to rely on the buses alone.
I also said that 30,000 was a generous estimate. More than likely the number would have been closer to 15,000. Yes, that would have helped. Again, though, it would not have been enough to rely on alone.
Baton Rouge is 90 minutes away from New Orleans. Not hours. It only took hours due to the traffic. If Baton Rouge did not have anywhere to put the people, they would have been in a bus during hurricane force winds. It’s not crap unless you have an inflated idea of how many hours away Baton Rouge is from New Orleans.
Again, I didn’t say that using buses was a lame and useless idea. I said that the idea that buses from New Orleans alone would solve the problem was wrong. No, if you read what I said, using buses from outside the state is not ironic. Matter of fact, it proves my point that the number of buses New Orleans had by themselves would not have been able to get everyone out.
Try reading something before you start ridiculing it. You might stop yourself from looking foolish for making accusations about what someone wrote that are not true.
George:
Thank you for the research into this. Have you been able to determine how many school buses are in the Baton Rouge School District? Baton Rouge probably has at least a couple of hundred buses that could have been put into service to evacuate the residents of New Orleans on Saturday and Sunday before the storm and could also have been used on Tuesday to help evacuate those who in the Superdome and the Convention Center.
8 September 2005, 2:18 pmmulligan:
No, I hadn’t but that is something that needed to be looked into.
Looking at a list of the 100 largest school districts based on census data from 2000, East Baton Rouge Parish has about 1/4 the number of students that Orange County Public Schools has.
At best that would be 200 more buses, however, it might be difficult for Baton Rouge to get people to drive into an area that was about to get hit head on by a hurricane.
Mugsy:
I was glad to find someone else that could shed more light on the “flooded buses” issue.
I had some observations of my own (many of which were also made in the article) and I’d appreciate some verification:
1. Most photos of 550 buses underwater in N.O. are from the NOISD bus depot. At least half of these buses weren’t even working to begin with. That takes us to ~275 functional buses (just imagine how long it would have taken to run around, trying each one of them to see if they worked or not).
2. Now you need to commandeer 275 bus drivers, private citizens with families of their own to take care of. Good luck.
3. Over 1,000 air-conditioned “Greyhound/Trailways/Metro” buses *were* commandeered and shuttled ~40,000 people to safety (108 of them arrived in Houston - I have the photos).
4. School buses just don’t have the range to get out of the state. 500 miles max. (a weak argument to be sure, but when electricity and gas pumps are out across the state, trying to fill 275 of them at once would have been “interesting” at best).
I’d especially like to confirm #1. Thanks.
10 September 2005, 1:59 pmDocbb:
I, too, am glad someone took on the issue of the school buses, which I believe is pretty much a red herring argument, for many reasons posted by you and others. This does not mean that I do not think that Nagin and Blanco are totally free of blame in this disaster, but that I am always suspicious of information like this that supposedly “proves” the state and local officials were stupid or callous or both. Especially when it begins to appear with increasing frequency (and in similar sounding language) in letters to the editor in my city newspaper.
What frustrates me in part are additional statements that claim no mandatory evacuation was ordered prior to the hurricane, when there was one, and 80% of the city did leave (otherwise the death and destruction would have been far worse). The city and state officials clearly did have some type of plan, but questions can be raised as to how well it was followed, and whether it was a good plan (those questions can be raised about any city, anywhere). Unfortunately, those types of questions are not being raised.
Although conservatives already are accusing Democrats and other liberals of partisan politics and “playing the blame game,” it strikes me that is, instead, what they are doing when they continue to repeat misleading information and distortions. It may take awhile to sort out what really happened, especially since it is hard to get any solid information that is unbiased.
Like Mugsy, I’d like to see confirmation of #1 in that post. It is something I’ve been suspecting after seeing footage of the buses and where they are located–it sure looks like a bus depot/warehouse area to me. How many of them were inoperational? Could they really have been used prior to the hurricane to evacuate large numbers of the sick and elderly? Clearly once the floodwaters came in to the city that was no longer a viable plan (since the buses also were flooded). Was the initial plan just to use them to put people in the Superdome and other shelters (I’ve read elsewhere that was part of the plan for those without cars, instead of transporting people to other cities)? If that was the case, the problem of the Superdome and convention center shelters would have remained. I don’t know the answer to these questions yet, as I am still looking. I’m concerned to find out more information because I have family and friends in the gulf region (in Gonzales,LA., Slidell, LA., and Gulfport, MS.).
When all is said and done, two weeks later I’m still thinking that the federal government, and esp. FEMA, is most too blame. Nothing I’ve read since has altered that initial view.
11 September 2005, 2:09 pmAndyG:
Never fails, show someone the simple truth that those crying foul could have done something rather than sit and do nothing waiting on an “entitlement” results in a claim of “those poor people couldn’t help themselves”.
Did the Feds screw up? Yes!
Did the State of LA screw up? Yup!
Did Nagin screw up? You Betcha!
Did the NOPD screw up? Count on it?
Could more have been done at all levels? Yes!
Only when the “libs”, “cons”, and “neo-cons” get this we will have any chance of fixing the mess.
I’m not holding my breath on that one though.
12 September 2005, 8:59 ammulligan:
Mugsy,
Give me some time and I’ll see what I can find out to answer your questions.
mulligan:
AndyG,
The point of this whole post was that the effect of the buses has been overstated. NOT that anyone is without blame in this mess.
Katrina Coverage “Liberal” excuses for the schoolbuses not being used:
[...] Can’t Keep Quiet: All together, maybe 30,000 people could have been evacuated using school buses. Maybe. Trust me, that’s being really, really generous. It’s also leaving at least 70,000 people stranded in New Orleans. At least. [...]
19 September 2005, 10:02 pmsteve:
Here’s the deal about the buses nagin didn’t use — It has been noted that some 255 buses were located about 1 - 2 miles from the superdome that could have been used to evac the city — but this statement assumes A LOT. — a. that all the buses are in working order, b. that keys to start each bus is readily available. c. each bus has a DRIVER. and d. That each bus is able to get to the superdome to evac everyone that was left in New Orleans.
a. It is, of course, not at all certain how many of these buses were in good working order. I suppose over time we may find this out, but let’s say for the sake of argument that a fair to good percentage; 85 - 90% of these busses were indeed in working order. That means that you now have 218 - 230
b. Can we assume that all these school buses had KEYS ? School bus drivers often own THEIR OWN BUS and act as CONTRACTORS. Would the keys of all the buses been located AT THAT SAME SITE? Or might some of the keys been in the pocket. dresser drawer, handbag ect of the bus OWNER who had evacuated with his family? — once again (although this is highly unlikely), lets assume for the sake of extraordinary fairness that 85% of the buses had keys located at the same place as the buses in question — this leaves 185 - 195 buses
c. Each bus of course needs a driver — school bus drivers in new orleans are NOT direct city or state employees. Neither are they duty bound to stay in a city that is about to be blown away by a massive category 4 or 5 hurricane. School bus drivers quite often have families of their own. Hazzard pay is typically not written into their contracts — but once again, for the sake of extreme fairness, let’s assume that 50% of these underpaid bus drivers stayed behind in a city that was about to be demolished by mother nature to save the day. through simple mathmatics this now leaves a very liberal estimate of around 92 - 97 buses to save the people of new orleans
if you’d like, you could also assume that the buses could have comandeered which leads one back to the ploblimatic key dilema in point b. and brings us back to the estimate of 185 - 195.
d. Finally let’s speculate that all 185 - 195 buses were able to get to superdome to evac the people of the good city of New Orleans
one more question,
How many people can you fit on 185 - 195 buses?
I actually asked a school bus driver about this one — “What’s the maximum number of people that this bus can hold” I asked “well,” he said “the sign in the back says the legal limit is 45 but I bet it could handle about 60 if people didn’t mind being uncomfortable.
So the answer I will accept, again being very generous and not considering the ederly, infirmed, overweight OR any of their precious belongings, is 60
Now I multiply the number of passengers 60, times the number of buses 195 to come up with (TADA !) 11700 uncomfortable people jammed past the legal limit, loaded in an orderly fashion onto school buses destined for parts unknown.
Of course it has also ben conservatively estimated that 100,000 people were actually left behind in New Orleans - 20% of the city’s total population of 500,000 people — and this means that even after Ray Nagin’s bus armada, somewhere in the nieghborhood of 88,300 MORE people would have had to be rescued, or evacuated
It would actually take 1667 buses to evac all those that were left behind
the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT on the other hand has MASSIVE resources that are almost IMMEDIATELY available and yet were not tapped until a full FIVE DAYS AFTER the storm made landfall
HOW DARE people try to shift the blame away from someone who HAD the resources but DID NOTHING, to a man with FAR LESS RESOURCES and was severly UNDERMANNED during an unprecidented crisis
20 September 2005, 1:15 amThee Humble Waffle™:
don't sit around waiting for the federal gov't. to help you in an emergency, that is like waiting for the police to come and take notes after you have already been murdered because you were to STUPID to own a weapon to protect yourself. Storms, like criminals, move faster than the beauraucratic gov't response to them. HELP YOURSELF!<p> It is the Left that enlarged the FG into the slow moving PIG that it has become. Blame NOLA for using levee money elsewhere… Blame NOLA citizens for sitting on their asses while Ray Nero fiddled… drowned his buses in this case. Do you really think Kerry would have taken quick action and saved you? That Leftyman is too busy combing his hair and preening to pay attention to citizens. No, put 90+% of the blame on the NOLA Mayor, the LA Governor, and the citizens of NOLA. Exactly where it belongs… they had plenty of warning.<p> You have two parties that play football with ALL of the issues that concern the American People… don't wait for those useless cockaroachas to do something for you, it isn't going to happen… and before you bash the Bushtit, open your eyes and see…. he is also somewhat of a leftyman. Your man.<p>Maybe the thousand + dead from Katrina would have been the ones on those drowned and unused school buses. Fact is: NOLA gov't did very little except play their weak race card… SICK and disgusting.
15 August 2007, 10:26 pmThee Humble Waffle™:
The school buses weren't filled with children; those buses were left to drown! THINK!!!
15 August 2007, 10:31 pm