Jadecristal
Member
From an AP article (excerpt here lifted from WP: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090101125.html)
Sooo... they take your stuff, for the "greater good." Despite my personal feelings on such things ( :banghead: ), is it legal? Or is this just back to "there is no law right now?" Other comments on this?
Jadecristal
NEW ORLEANS -- Managers at two French Quarter hotels teamed up to hire 10 buses to carry their 500 guests to safer ground, but federal officials commandeered the vehicles and told the guests to go to the convention center with other evacuees, one of the managers said.
Peter Ambros, general manager of Astor Hotel at Astor Crowne Plaza, said Thursday the guests had been waiting on the street for the buses for more than four hours Wednesday night.
"We kept hearing they were coming, they were coming," said guest Bill Hedrick, a Houston oilman who was with family including his mother-in-law, who uses a walker.
He said he and the others had paid $45 a seat. When the crowd learned the buses would never arrive, "everyone was totally stunned," Hedrick said.
People were disappointed and angry, too _ but not violent, he said.
Hedrick, who had moved to the New Orleans Convention Center along with Ambros and many of the other guests, had harsh words Thursday for city officials, who he said were focused on helping residents. "The tourists here are an afterthought," he said.
Lauren Helvie, 25, said her SUV was commandeered by police.
Helvie parked her Toyota Forerunner in the garage at the Ritz Carlton hotel in the French Quarter during the storm and returned to retrieve it Thursday. But police told her she wouldn't be getting her car.
"They said, 'What kind of car is it? A Forerunner? Then for sure you're not getting it back,'" Helvie said.
The police officer didn't explain anything to her, but she said the hotel manager told her police were using her car and others like it to evacuate elderly and ill out of the city.
Sooo... they take your stuff, for the "greater good." Despite my personal feelings on such things ( :banghead: ), is it legal? Or is this just back to "there is no law right now?" Other comments on this?
Jadecristal