September 24, 2005

September 24, 2005, marks a grim turn in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: as Hurricane Rita struck western Louisiana and Texas, an evacuation bus fire made the risks of moving vulnerable people impossible to ignore. The deaths became part of a wider dispute over whether institutions should evacuate residents before a storm, and what responsibility they bore when either staying or leaving could bring harm.

Rita and the Bus Fire

Widespread evacuations took place before Rita, and roads in the storm’s projected path clogged. A charter bus carrying residents from Brighton Gardens of Bellaire, a nursing home near Houston, toward a sister facility in Dallas caught fire. The bus had an illegal license, and its driver was an undocumented Mexican national. Oxygen tanks in the luggage bays exploded; 23 of the 38 elderly people aboard died. Houston was ultimately spared by the storm.

The tragedy offered no simple measure of safety. Evacuation had moved residents out of the storm’s projected path, but the journey itself became fatal for many of them. The contrast was especially sharp in a region still confronting the consequences of Katrina, where the ability to leave—and the risks attached to leaving—had already been unevenly distributed.

The Argument Over Evacuation

The bus deaths entered the public debate over St. Rita’s Nursing Home, whose owners had chosen not to evacuate residents before Katrina. Their attorney, James A. Cobb Jr., had defended that decision on television after the other three nursing homes in St. Bernard Parish evacuated. After the Texas deaths, he wrote to a network news program that they made his clients’ decision look more reasonable. He also emphasized that the owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano, had remained at the nursing home and tried to save residents, and called them heroes.

The legal response continued alongside that defense. Before investigators were due to meet with the Manganos, the attorney general issued a warrant for their arrests on 34 counts each of negligent homicide for failing to evacuate before Katrina. They surrendered, and Attorney General Charles Foti publicly condemned them; Cobb objected that Foti had acted without knowing the full story. The two cases posed opposing dangers rather than a clean answer: staying could expose residents to a storm, while evacuation could expose them to hazardous transport.

Earlier Evidence of Transport Risk

The risks of evacuation were not new. Before Katrina, residents of Ferncrest Manor Living Center had died while being transported from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. A brief radio report described three deaths apparently linked to heat exposure during a journey in buses without working air-conditioning, drinking water, and, in some cases, nurses. Residents spent as long as four hours boarding and six hours on the congested route; survivors were treated for dehydration.

That earlier episode and the Rita bus fire complicate any account that treats evacuation as a single, uncomplicated act of rescue. They do not erase the dangers of leaving people in an institution during a disaster. They show instead how transport capacity, equipment, staffing, distance, and congested roads could determine whether an evacuation offered protection or became another source of peril.

Significance in the Katrina Aftermath

During Katrina, New Orleans’s mandatory evacuation order came amid major gaps in transportation: many residents had no way to leave, traffic was already stalled, and Acadian Ambulance dispatchers faced more calls than their available vehicles could meet, with some ambulances trapped on the interstate. September 24 placed those failures in a broader and unsettled context. Rita demonstrated the danger of evacuation in practice, while the cases surrounding St. Rita’s kept attention on the danger of not evacuating.

The date therefore belongs not only to the chronology of a second hurricane, but also to the argument over how institutions should protect people who cannot readily protect themselves. The evidence presents no risk-free choice: it records preventable failures and competing hazards, without making the bus deaths proof that remaining in place was safe.