> What would your dad do? :) Serious question that's come up on another
> list: Do they return the buses to the garage and gas up at the end of
> the day? I thought maybe your dad might know what the practice is in a
> non-hurricane prone state since we are just curious about normal
> conditions anyway.
I can ask him, but he worked for the bus service here 25 years ago. He was director of planning.
> I'm guessing that they don't gas them all up under hurricane conditions,
> primarily because (at least around here), there isn't enough gas. We are
> usually out of fuel --though perhaps the city/county have stores I'm
> unaware of. This is because the ships and truckers stop delivering b/c
> it's too dangerous. What we do have is quickly depleted because people
> who've bugged out gas up, private individuals horde, and you are
> supposed to gas up your vehicle beforehand if you don't evac. This is
> because there won't be any available after the storm -- a severe problem
> after Andrew.
The main problem is that people didn't really know that the hurricane was going to hit New Orleans directly until about 30-48 hours ahead of time. I was thinking yesterday that some of the blame for the situation should be laid at the feet of the corporate media. They've played up stories about people "weathering the storm" for years. They failed to do any serious reporting on the fact that the poor, people of color, kids, the sick, and the elderly wouldn't be able to just hop in some SUV and high tail it out of town. If you watched the pre-hurricane coverage on TV, you'd get the impression that all the residents of the Gulf Coast are white middle class people who either drove out of the danger zone or
foolishly decided to tough it out.
The corporate media pre-hurricane coverage could also be blamed in other ways. How much do all of those on-the-scene reports of meteorologists and reporters blowing in the wind lull officials and citizens into a false sense of security? On TV you see these people filing their reports from the safety of some motel parking lot. It simply looks like a hurricane is something that blows Geraldo around and causes some minor damage.
Another problem is this TV fixation on the eyes of a hurricanes and where they will strike. Here in Kansas City, a local TV meteorologist presented a very insightful explanation of a hurricane's overall damage. He showed an overlay of a 40-mile-wide hurricane path over a map of the K.C. metro area. He explained that a hurricane was like an F1 or F2 tornado that affected this entire area over the course of 3-5 hours. This presentation was short and to the point, while network TV coverage has given people the false idea that hurricane damage is mostly limited to the area right around the eye, or even more specifically, the northeast quadrant of a hurricane. This latter bit may be scientifically accurate, but it was too boring to scare the shit out of people who were living in the bowl of New Orleans and, more importantly, the people who were supposedly in charge of any evacuation plans.
Chuck