Ironic Counterpoint of the Week

Point

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, explaining what he needs to evacuate the city after Hurricane Katrina's hit:

I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.

Counterpoint

As reported by JunkYard Blog, photos show hundreds of school buses, sitting useless in flooded lots, next to the freeway leading out of New Orleans, just a few miles from the Superdome.

Logic would suggest that, if you were mayor of New Orleans, knew that a major hurricane had an almost certain chance of cutting off nearly all your transportation links, leaving people stranded, that you would use all the resources you had to get people out of the city, including school buses and your own three-hundred-plus city transit buses, BEFORE the hurricane hit, instead of demanding buses that can't get to you afterwards.

The fact that those buses are still in New Orleans demonstrates that New Orleans's disaster plan does not operate on logic.