The New Orleans Times Picayune pieces together some of the back story on the Katrina bus fiasco:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, thousands of people were trapped in the city without food, water and medical care and growing increasingly desperate for rescue. But a top aide to Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent out an e-mail informing his colleagues that his staff had stopped calling for the buses needed to evacuate people from the Superdome and other places of refuge.

“NO MORE CALLS FOR BUSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Ty Bromell wrote Wednesday morning, Aug. 31. “My people are not calling for buses now.”

Bromell, who heads Blanco’s Office of Rural Development, said he had gotten word — from Leonard Kleinpeter, a special assistant to the governor who was spearheading the effort to wrangle buses from school boards, churches and other groups — that the vehicles were no longer needed.

The understanding, Bromell said, was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had enough buses on the way, and that the military also would airlift people from the Superdome on Chinook helicopters. His staff for the next several hours instead turned their attention to other matters, such as trying to get generators for emergency centers hit by the storm.

But later that afternoon the focus again turned to how to get people out of New Orleans. “The governor turned to me and said, ‘Where are the buses, where are the buses?’ ” Bromell recalled, saying Blanco told him to start getting buses again. At that point, the push became more aggressive, with Blanco later that evening issuing an executive order allowing the state to commandeer local government’s school buses.

What was the holdup?

In the postmortem on the state and federal response to Katrina, one of the key questions will be why it took so long to get thousands of people out of New Orleans after the storm.

Indeed, Blanco focused specifically on the federal failure to quickly provide buses in the written narrative that she supplied last week to congressional committees investigating the government response to the storm. She noted a conversation on the day of the storm with Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA, promising her that “FEMA has 500 buses on standby, ready to be deployed.” When those did not arrive, the governor’s staff jumped into action to get their own buses, Blanco wrote in her day-by-day breakdown of her activities.

FEMA spokesman Marty Bahamonde said the agency could not comment on any details in the e-mails or state officials’ recollections surrounding the described events because FEMA officials had not yet seen the documents. Though Blanco has said she will provide the public with a way to see the documents, they have so far been released only to the news media and the congressional committees.

The prescient Bryan Preston of Junkyard Blog, who was ahead of the curve on the bus angle and all things Katrina, busts Blanco here:

Blanco was more concerned with appearance than facts; it was obvious as the disaster progressed that Blanco was not in fact in charge of any response. She encouraged looting and stood in the way of needed aid to those stranded in New Orleans.

Taken together, she knew she had failed and therefore sought to spin the disaster back on Bush to deflect the political fallout from herself. Blanco lied, people died.

Bubba/Blanco spoofing over at La Shawn Barber’s.

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