Paul at Wizbang has found Ray Nagin’s buses on Google Maps. Sixty of them. Unflooded. Less than five miles away.

Dr. Rusty says this goes beyond incompetence.

The Anchoress says Nagin should have resigned.

If you’re using Google Earth, fly to coordinates:

29 degrees, 57 minutes, 15.09 seconds North
90 degrees, 02 minutes, 51.42 seconds West
Eye altitude around 500 feet

The date on this Google satellite image is obviously different than the one Paul grabbed from Google Maps (older, certainly, because if you fly over to the SuperDome its top is intact), but it does seem to agree with Paul’s hypothesis that there may have been even more buses moved into the building (or possibly they were in use elsewhere).

Were they operational? If they were, it appears Paul may have quite the scoop.

As an aside, Paul was a New Orleans resident and lost much in the storm.

Think about it for a second from my chair… (I’m not whining but) I’m almost 40 years old…. Here is the sum total of all my worldly possessions: 4 pairs of shorts, 5 shirts, 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of underwear, 1 pair of blue jeans, a box of family pictures, 2 flashlights, a piece of trench art my grandfather brought back from WWI and my father’s hammer. (Hey, it means a lot to me!) That’s it. Everything else is gone. And BTW, I’m unemployed.

UPDATE: Rusty has more analysis. Enough to make ones head spin this late in the evening. He and Paul went back and forth and came to roughly the same conclusion about Nagin.

UPDATE 2: Llama School makes the case that Nagin in fact was trying to use those buses. But Paul reacts, taking the Llama School writer to the mat.