Nagin should be charged with destruction of city property, too. If he'd followed his city's evacuation plan, these buses wouldn't have been destroyed:
Ah, nothing like dumbing-down the news. Intellectual fast food. Then an hour later you're hungry again.
It's a nice mythology but not that simple:
It is unclear whether Mayor Nagin knew these particular buses existed, since the Orleans Parish School Board is not under his jurisdiction and his office would not normally know the location of OPSB bus yards or be able to contact the drivers of those buses to place them into service. Normally it is the job of FEMA to coordinate between the various local jurisdictions such as the OPSB and the City of New Orleans in this case. That is, under the rules of prior hurricane responses, FEMA would ask all local jurisdictions for a list of resources under their control. Then FEMA would have taken a request from Nagin for buses, relayed it to the Orleans Parish School Board or other local jurisdictions which had buses, and at that point the OPSB would have provided the buses to Nagin. That coordination did not happen here, but it is unclear whether Nagin ever made such a request prior to the hurricane and after the hurricane they were underwater and useless.
However, if he had known about them, the declaration of a state of emergency on August 26 gave him the right under Louisiana law to commandeer them for the duration of the emergency. The failure to issue a timely evacuation order in effect made it physically impossible to evacuate the nursing homes, hospitals, and those without automobiles. -- Wikinews
Then there would be the logistics of rounding up drivers for these buses (if they were even in working condition) the time frame of doing all this in a maximum of two days -- the same two days the populace was already scrambling, and the inevitable expense it would all have cost, feeding yet more Monday morning quarterback whiners like Berzerk.