New Orleans Buses

The story of buses, New Orleans and evacuation gets more and more interesting. This article in the Chicago Tribune tells a very interesting story. (See also my earlier post which references Blanco's side of the story.)

The story is that FEMA had contracted to Landstar Express America to provide transportation assistance in the event of an emergency, such as a Hurricane. However, the magnitude of Katrina overwhelmed Landstar's ability to provide the needed buses in a timely manner. In spite of this, FEMA insisted on working only with Landstar and chose to wait until the Landstar buses arrived rather use another source. This becomes egregiously incompetent on the part of FEMA when you realize that other sources of buses were trying to supply FEMA with assistance all during the week after the storm hit, but were unable to get through. Read the whole article but it seems that as more and more information comes to light that the problems in New Orleans were to a marked extent caused by the federal authorities, not by the locals.

For further comment on this see Kos and Eschaton