How many could have been evacuated from the City of New Orleans?
Note that this subject is being discussed in a thread over at Generation Why---
A quick back-of-envelope estimate:
In the images on this website there are 745 buses.
(There were also about 100 abandoned vans and other abandoned passenger vehicles identified in just the handful of images here, but let's exclude them from the estimate for the sake of simplicity. Likewise other local buses left unidentified thusfar.)
Up to 70 passengers per long bus or a maximum of 40,740 passengers per trip of 582 long buses. Up to 50 passengers per short bus or a maximum of 8,150 passengers per trip of 163 short buses. There was a maximum capacity of 48,890 passengers per outbound trip.
Assume that 25% of the seats would have been unavailable for a variety of reasons: inoperative buses, space used for supplies and medical equipment, vehicle breakdowns, and so forth. Round down to 36,000 actual seats available per evacuation trip.
Destinations were 4-6 hours outside of New Orleans and west of the forecasted path of Katrina. Other buses could have been deployed from those destinations and from points enroute and also further afield. But for simplicity we'll leave these resources out of the estimate.
The evacuation plans called for a 72 hour notice of evacuation prior to landfall of the Hurricane. That would allow for 6 two-way trips per bus, or a potential of 216,000 passengers evacuated in total.
That represented an overcapacity to evacuate approximately 100,000 people left behind in New Orleans without their own private means of transportation. Note that upwards of 50,000 have refused to leave even in the aftermath of Katrina and despite the ready and massive assistance to evacuate.
Even if just 48 hours had been available to willing evacuees, there were more than enough buses on-hand from within New Orleans alone. Likewise with just 24 hours notice as there would have been time enough for a single 2-way trip and another 1-way trip to move 72,000 people to safer ground.
So in the most time-constrained scenario there was actual capacity to evacuate more than the 50,000 people who would have gone willingly. Unless people expected martial law to have been declared and all stragglers to be forciblely removed at gunpoint, it would appear that there are no logistical reasons to excuse the lack of a plausible plan being implemented by a moderately competent evacuation team with moderately competent leadership at the local and state levels. New Orleans had experienced a near miss last year with Ivan and that shock should have prompted at least as much effort in preparations as was made elsewhere along the Gulf Coast this summer.
This rough estimate of potential evacuees by bus is not meant to be definitive but illustrative. Local planners and implementers were tasked with making plausible plans based on definitive estimates of their available resources. The feds were tasked with filling any gaps that the local and state planners and teams could not cover themselves -- at the request of the locals.
posted by Where's The Beef? @ 9/21/2005 09:00:00 PM
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