Quote Originally Posted by AdrianII
The point is there would possibly have been no Superdome tragedy.

There are 7.725 school buses in the State of Louisiana.

Press Release
Louisiana Governor's Office

Date: 9/1/2005

Governor Blanco Announces Executive Order

Baton Rouge, LA— Governor Blanco today announced the following Executive Order:

Executive Order NO. KBB 2005- 31- provides that pursuant to the Louisiana Homeland Security and Emergency Assistance and Disaster Act, R.S. 29:721, et seq., grants emergency powers to the governor, where, she has in consultation with school superintendents, utilized public school buses for transportation of Hurricane Katrina evacuees. As you are aware most public school districts will not begin school until Tuesday, September 6th 2005.

Only on Thursday, my man -- five full days after recommended evacuation was proclaimed.
Problem is, this wasn't already in place. Even if you have it in place you don't have much time. It needs coordination at state and local level to feed in buses. I'm guessing you need about 2,000 of these buses, with driver, and a guide/security/communications on each one to get the last 20% in New Orleans alone. Turnaround time from call up is probably on the order of 24 hours at best, based on call up time/organization time, travel time, load/collection time, and actual getting the heck out of dodge time (more than 6 hours itself.) Remember, you also have to route them to avoid contraflow congestion etc.

80/20 rule would seem to apply to evacuation. The first 80% won't take much time, the last 20% will require 80% of the effort.

This would need to be repeated for many smaller cities in the area. I believe this is the way we need to go, but it isn't something we are going to be able to do successfully without some forethought. We need to be doing this sort of planning all along the coast, the Mississippi, fault zones, volcanically active areas, etc. It's not so monumental as it sounds once a few model systems are worked out.