Adding insult to injury, many of the companies that scrambled buses and drivers to assist FEMA haven't been paid by the government for their services, Pantuso told Reconstruction Watch.

"When the government needed these guys, they were there within 48 hours," he said. "In some cases, they cancelled other trips so they could step in and help out in what was obviously a national emergency. I think it's unconscionable that the government can't pay them within 90 days."

According to Pantuso's group, the first buses commandeered to move New Orleans' beleaguered residents to safety didn't arrive until the Thursday after the hurricane hit—nearly a week after Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation.

Worse, neither FEMA or the FAA appear to have made any calls to the interstate bus industry in the days prior to the storm despite widespread warnings from weather officials that Katrina was becoming a monster hurricane that had the potential to demolish New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

FEMA's initial contacts with the private busing industry, Pantuso recalled, came one day into the storm, when small bus lines in the Mid-South and East Coast began getting frantic requests for vehicles from two limousine companies in New York and Chicago that had been sub-contracted by Landstar to manage the evacuation. These bus lines then called the bus association to find out if the companies were genuine FEMA subcontractors.

But when Pantuso called FEMA seeking this information, he was stunned to learn that FEMA itself didn't know this important task had been contracted out. "FEMA couldn't answer us for days," he said. (Strangely, on the day of the storm, former FEMA Director Michael Brown informed Louisiana Governor Blanco that "FEMA has 500 buses on standby, ready to be deployed," according to internal e-mails released by the governor's office in December.)

Pantuso's account is consistent with a startling report that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sept. 23. Landstar, which held the evacuation contract, didn't ask its subcontractors about the availability of evacuation buses until Aug. 30, 18 hours after the storm hit and a full two days after Nagin ordered the evacuation, the Tribune reported.

The failure by Landstar, FEMA and the FAA to respond quickly to the hurricane, the newspaper noted, "underscores a critical failure in the disaster plan: the inability of government to provide even the most rudimentary transportation to take people out of harm's way."