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| - Photograph shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot.
The buses didn't sit in a parking lot because no one thought to use them to evacuate residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina.
The photo verification part of this item is simple enough: The image of school buses in a flooded parking lot displayed above was taken in
That this photograph represents a bungled opportunity to have evacuated a substantial number of New Orleans residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina is not supported by evidence. Such a claim presumes an availability of resources (e.g., experienced drivers, fuel) and workable logistics (e.g., sufficient means of notifying and getting residents to departure points, sufficiently clear roads for multiple trips out of town and back, adequate facilities within a reasonable driving distance capable of providing shelter, food, and water to a large number of people for an indeterminate period of time on short notice) that may or may not have been present. (There's no guarantee that all the buses shown in this picture were even in working condition.) And, given the particular geography of
More important, residents of New Orleans received no pre-Katrina warning from federal or state officials, nor from hurricane or engineering experts, that the city's leveescould breach and fail. They weren't looking to jump aboard buses and evacuate because they thought they were relatively safe; they didn't anticipate that levee construction problems would end up destroying their homes and lives.
Some opportunities like the one posited here might have been missed in
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