No Way Out of New Orleans as Planes, Trains and Buses Cancel

Passengers boarding Continental’s packed flight at 3:30 p.m. Sunday from New Orleans to Houston felt lucky to have escaped before Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast.

But others weren’t so lucky as airlines canceled flights in advance of the storm.

That and other episodes, including a cutoff of rail and interstate bus service well ahead of Katrina’s arrival in New Orleans early Monday, caused some hard feelings in a city where thousands of residents remained trapped by floodwater days later.

“The thing that disappointed us a great deal were the canceled flights,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco told CNN. “On Sunday morning, they could have been flying people out of here.... A lot of people did get stranded like that.”

But transportation officials had explanations.

The airlines say they were acting on their own safety regulations, concern for their airport employees who had to evacuate their own families, and the need to get their aircraft -- which cost $20 million and up -- out of the path of a powerful hurricane.

“We take issue with the argument that we somehow abandoned people to the hurricane,” said Jack Evans, spokesman for the Air Transport Assn., a Washington-based trade group for the major carriers.

“All the carriers have their own procedures.”

Added Basil Barimo, a vice president of the association: “With the industry in the state it’s in, the airlines hate to walk away from revenue.”

Delta Air Lines’ decision to end its regular passenger air service out of New Orleans just after midnight Saturday was based on assessing the safety of its planes, employees and passengers, the accessibility of the airport and the projected course of the weather, according to Anthony Black, spokesman for Atlanta-based Delta.

“Our goal is to get as many of our passengers out of the city as long as the conditions remain operable,” he said.

Other airlines considered the conditions operable longer. American flew its last plane out at 1 p.m. Sunday. And US Airways flew two-thirds of its schedule Sunday, with its last plane departing at 1:30 p.m.

“We made the best decision we could based on the information we had,” said spokeswoman Amy Kudwa.

Roy Williams, director of aviation at the New Orleans airport, who stayed at his post through the hurricane, said the facility was open to humanitarian and other crucial flights but that it could be weeks before normal air traffic resumed, even though the runways are dry, and damage was limited to a new section of the airport, where the hurricane sheared off the roof.

Frank Miller, director of the Pensacola Regional Airport in Florida, said it took 24 hours to close the Pensacola airport before Hurricane Ivan last year -- and speculated that New Orleans might well have needed a similar amount of prep time.

“Ivan came in early on a Thursday morning, and we closed our airport at 8 a.m. Wednesday to give us time to prepare the airport,” he said. Loading docks had to be closed, gate arms removed, the facility locked down so that it did not become a haven for refugees.

“From the time we closed to the time we reopened, we were shut down for nine days,” he said.

Other transportation modes also cleared out of New Orleans at least 24 hours before the hurricane hit.

Amtrak had no choice; its tracks run through the city’s levees. Once officials in Louisiana put the floodgates in place across the levees, said spokesman Marc Magliari, “we had no usable route in and out of the city.”

As a result, the four lines that ended or originated in New Orleans are now leaving from other cities.

“Our primary priority now is making sure we account for and reach out to our employees and work with the freight railroads to ascertain the amount of danger to their infrastructure,” Magliari said.

And Greyhound, which ended service in New Orleans late Saturday, said safety was its priority. “We operate as long as it’s safe,” said spokesperson Anna Folmnsbee.

Greyhound and its subsidiaries, she said, are coordinating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help evacuate residents in the affected Gulf Coast states.