A convoy of 70 city buses, accompanied by an assortment of support vehicles and volunteers, departed lower Manhattan on Saturday morning for a 24-hour trip south to help evacuate victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The caravan, including another 47 vehicles from the city police and mass transit, was expected to arrive in New Orleans on Sunday to start ferrying victims of the hurricane out of the crippled Crescent City. They left from Police Headquarters, just a few blocks east of ground zero.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, cognizant of the nation's outpouring of aid to New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said the city "will help those who helped us." The group that left Saturday will join members of the Fire Department, the NYPD and the city Office of Emergency Management already on site in New Orleans.
It was an amazing site to see, New York City giving of itself to help the people of New Orleans. And it just made me so sad. Here it was Saturday afternoon, holiday weekend traffic, and here are these busses and police equipment (mobile command centers, police cars) plodding through the traffic. How much faster could they have gotten there if the President had taken leadership and put out the call on Monday night? How many people could have been saved having their last moments on earth end in the filth and misery of the Superdome, or the Convention Center?
