first on some technical issues of logistics
>.You have approximately 12 hrs to do it from the time the first bus leaves
to the time you can safely get the last bus shipped off. <
I think I have a little more time than this; I am making the decision 24 hours ahead of time and I am relying on resources no more than 6 hours away. I also assume that I am not restricted to buses; at least half of my population will be leaving in private cars, not least because they want to save the cars, so dd-provided transport is actually only needed for 250k. I have a train station too which will be useful while the hurricane is still out at sea; you can put a hell of a lot of people through a train station and get them away very quickly if you have the trains and a plan, so I would ahead of time organised 1) a plan and 2) access to trains. I suspect I could put 50k people out of town on trains quite easily (1000 people per train, a train every 15 minutes for 12 hours - you can pack trains a lot closer than buses because people aren't going to be on them so long), and this makes a significant dent in my transport problem.
>you know that the average highway speed is 25-35 mph<
Yes, I suspect the low end of this range is more realistic since the roads will be full of private cars. I would set up roadblocks along a route from the train station to the interstate (the train station is my assembly point) so that at least the traffic in town doesn't kill my average speed. At this rate, assuming 50 people to a bus, half an hour each end loading and unloading and assuming I need to shift them at least 100 miles, then with 1000 buses half of which make two trips each, I can shift 75k people on buses.
>If you gas up all the buses, you deplete (by half) the supply you have for
gassing up generators, emergency vehicles, and police cars for the aftermath<
Don't care; the aftermath is a separate problem and I will be able to arrange supplies from elsewhere because I have a plan - I have identified sources for as much fuel as I need, made the phone call to buy it and arranged the distribution for as soon as it is safe.
>95% of your experienced bus drivers have bugged out.<
Bug 'em back in. Or use inexperienced bus drivers, or whatever. I would be prepared to let normal occupational health & safety standards slide a little in this case because there is a hurricane coming.
>Roads shut down when winds hit 40 mph.<
Yes and by this time I would appear to still have 125,000 people hanging around the railway station (assuming your 12 hour estimate was correct; I think I would have more like 18 hours which would allow me to shift at least half of these, and if two-thirds rather than half of the population leave in private cars, I think I am the last man left in town even on the 12 hour timetable).
But anyway, assuming that I still have 125,000 people to take care of, I am still actually not downhearted. Being in New Orleans is by no means necessarily the worst place for them to be in a hurricane and flood because there are any number of safe places that I could take them to, whereas the ones that I've bussed out of town, I also had to have a plan at the other end for what to do with them when they got there (I would of course have made such a plan, since I work for the Emergency Management Administration and making plans like this is my job). I agree with Kelley that isn't at all obvious to me that evacuating the city would have been the sensible thing to do; after all, they evacuated about 40k people to the Superdome and look how much good it did them.
So I'm looking at taking a lot of people to whatever big safe halls I have access too (working out where these were would be about a fortnight's work with the town plans so best do it ahead of time). So we all trek down to our allotted billets, with a lot of police (all leave cancelled early in the process), a plentiful supply of clean water (the source for which I had also identified ahead of time, and which got transported in while everyone else was being transported out, in a single lane of the motorway reserved for this sort of thing) and we wait the storm out. Oh dammit a flood as well. Still, no matter, because the interstate is not down and so my contingency plan to get a load of lorries in with chemical toilets and bottled water has not been derailed.
I think the point here is that the chaos which occurred wasn't the result of any intrinsic technological impossibility of doing it any better. It happened because at crucial points above I'm either a) saying "in accordance with my plan" when there wasn't one or b) saying "and then I acquire these resources" spending money which people weren't allowed to spend, for administrative reasons. These two issues are political failures, not technological ones and I am very wary of logistics explanations which, if true, would have implied that such events as Rock in Rio, the Dunkirk evacuation, the Normandy landings etc could not have happened.
dd
PS: the fact[1] that the looters were armed can also hardly be taken as something sui generis and unrelated to the nature of American society and politics.
[1]I do not necessarily accept it as a fact that violent rioting looters were a huge problem because I haven't seen any footage of them at all, or any first-hand accounts (as opposed to lurid secondhand accounts which look like rumours).
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