Gov. Chris Christie: Atlantic City is on its own until at least 7AM tomorrow

[happyslug]

25. And HOW was the Mayor to get the people out of the city???

From what I have read, the Mayor barely had the buses to get the people to the Shelters, if he had instead used those buses to evacuate people, it meant leaving people behind. Remember we are dealing with people who do NOT own a car, thus how do you get them out??? This same problem happened in New Orleans during Katrina, no one had a plan to get the people without cars out of New Orleans (Actually they was a plan, but depended on using School buses, buses that normally were stored on one of the lowest laying areas of New Orleans and were among the first thing flooded).

Sorry, every coastal city should have a plan to evacuate its citizens, including those without cars. Most don't for the buses they do have, are used to haul people from one end of town to the other, but makes several trips per day over the same route. During an evacuation, the buses gets filled once and then must go somewhere else with those passengers and at best it can come back the next day for another load of passengers. School buses can help, but most school buses haul 4-6 trips of children each day (most two trips, one for grade school, second for high school, some do three, Grade school, Middle School and High School) and like regular buses have to haul one load of passengers instead of the 2-3 it normally hauls. On top of this, a lot of people do NOT use either form of buses, i.e. they walk, and thus are additional load on the buses.

In simple terms, a city needs at least (and probably more) 3 to 5 times the regular buses it uses on a regular day, backed up by 3-5 number of school buses uses on a normal school day, to evacuate these people without cars. These excess buses have to come from somewhere and that is the job of the State for it can find those buses from Cities further inland and shipped them in. The Mayor has no authority of such outside buses, for they are outside his jurisdiction, but the Governor does for he has jurisdiction over the whole state.

Once you accept the fact you can NOT remove them from the city, then the best solution is to use those buses to get people to secure points, which is what the Mayor did. Yes, the better option would have been to remove them, but is seems that was NOT an option, given the resources of the Mayor and the City of Atlantic City.