First, let’s acknowledge that it was George Bush who got last Sunday’s evacuation of New Orleans going, as reported in a NOLA story at 10:48 am on last Sunday, well before the storm struck:

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

But Blanco did not mobilize the National Guard, declare martial law, or give the necessary pre-emptive orders to retain government authority in a time of crisis. She showed, rather, passivity and incompetence. God only knows if she has no executive ability, or if she thinks she has to get a polling firm to tell her what to do, or what. For his part, Mayor Nagin was inept as well:

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

But all flights had not been cancelled at the time the mayor made his statement, and it appears at least possible that some additional emergency flights could have been arranged. WSJ:

[C]onditions were OK to operate in well into Sunday. American Airlines says it operated its full schedule until 1 p.m., then canceled everything after that. The carrier did fly in nearly 300 extra seats before the shutdown, using bigger planes on its 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. flights to Dallas and adding an extra 757 flight at 1 p.m. to get as many people out as possible.

Continental Airlines flew 10 of its 12 scheduled flights on Sunday; the last left at 4:30 p.m. with 54 empty seats. Continental even sent 20 extra employees from Houston into New Orleans on Sunday to help process customers and get everyone out, then evacuated the employees on the last flight out.

Southwest Airlines, which carries the most passengers from New Orleans with about 30% of the market, said it had planned to shut down at 3 p.m., but some flights ran late and the carrier flew them in anyway because customers were waiting. The last flight departed New Orleans at 6 p.m.

Oh, yes, and all the buses above remained unused and empty, despite the ample time to put them to use evacuating the poor, the lame and the halt. This mayor and this governor cost lives and created unbelievable misery because of their incompetence. Their performance — in advance of the storm and with warnings from the highest levels — was inexcusable.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 7:21 pm and is filed under art, culture, business, Democrats, General, idiots!, Left of Left. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.