Re: the school busses
Sep. 5th, 2005 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiYes, they should have been used to get people outside the hurricane cone (ie Houston or somewhere in the vicinity) but they would not have been enough to get everyone out.
Many of you know that my brother in law is in the Navy and has been based in New Orleans for nearly a year - he left New Orleans at around four am last Sunday and as of ten am, was only halfway to Houston. The roads were that clogged, and people were driving, at most, at thirty miles per hour. And the concern here in Miami, and all hurrican zone locations, is that people would evacuate and be stuck on the highway in gale- or hurricane-force winds, and die there, from wind or flood, which is why evacuations need to be completed, usually, twelve hours ahead of the eye-wall coming ashore.
So the busses, assuming 70 people got aboard each, would have held perhaps two or three thousand people, at most. In other words, barely five per cent of those who could have gotten out.
And there would have been no time to turn them around and use them for another run. They would have been a one-time outlet.
Yes, they should have been used for the ill, the elderly, the pregnant, and one or two accompaniers for each. They would have saved lives.
But they would have been a band-aid on a slit artery. They would just not have been enough.
Many of you know that my brother in law is in the Navy and has been based in New Orleans for nearly a year - he left New Orleans at around four am last Sunday and as of ten am, was only halfway to Houston. The roads were that clogged, and people were driving, at most, at thirty miles per hour. And the concern here in Miami, and all hurrican zone locations, is that people would evacuate and be stuck on the highway in gale- or hurricane-force winds, and die there, from wind or flood, which is why evacuations need to be completed, usually, twelve hours ahead of the eye-wall coming ashore.
So the busses, assuming 70 people got aboard each, would have held perhaps two or three thousand people, at most. In other words, barely five per cent of those who could have gotten out.
And there would have been no time to turn them around and use them for another run. They would have been a one-time outlet.
Yes, they should have been used for the ill, the elderly, the pregnant, and one or two accompaniers for each. They would have saved lives.
But they would have been a band-aid on a slit artery. They would just not have been enough.
