Somewhere in the back of all this evac-talk....one has to wonder where they would have housed two or three million people, and how this would have worked. The obvious route would have been I-45 or I-69 (all north). Even if the state and federal folks had the US military lined up....it’s hard to imagine twenty camps set up 200 miles north of the city and able to handle 50,000 people each.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anyone has ever done a FEMA-like exercise to handle one-million residents on some evacuation order.
Do you personally believe that the Dem Mayor and the Republican Judge should have pretended like the info that came from the Army Corps of Engineers shouldnt be trusted because it didn’t come from MSNBC..meanwhile knowing the info was true?
Assuming this is how all of this plays out..we will find out in due time.
Some people would have gone to other relatives in the state. Elderly could have gone to other nursing homes in the area on higher ground.
I think the answer has to be somewhere in between ordering everyone to evacuate and telling everyone to shelter in place. Some people are less able to survive disasters; some areas are more prone to flooding than others. The thing is every city of any size is supposed to have disaster planners on the payroll. This is what they are for, do they not have a plan? There should be a map of areas that are expected to flood the worst, and there should also be a list of vulnerable places, like nursing homes.
Part of the planning also needs to be to know where you are going to be able to send people. The controversy with Osteen over the church is a perfect example. If a church or other facility that is not city owned could possibly be used as a shelter make arrangements ahead of time with the owner. Get a commitment from places to use for shelter if needed, then it is not always a last minute surprise.
Some areas are prone to hurricanes/flooding, that is a known fact so there has to be a way to prepare ahead for it. Every city should have a disaster plan, and I am pretty sure the feds have paid out tons of taxpayer money over the past several years to finance readiness. It just didn’t seem to happen.
You don’t house everyone who evacuates. They find places to go. Hotels, relatives, churches, etc. Its Texas, not Germany. Not everything had to be planned and executed by government. Governments job was to give the warning, and keep roads open.
Military helicopters are landing in my neighborhood.
Evacuating flood victims.
They look like blackhawk types. They have a red cross on them.
guy in door got mad at me, waved angtily yesterday when I was inadvertently standing in his landing spot when they came in.
“Somewhere in the back of all this evac-talk....one has to wonder where they would have housed two or three million people, and how this would have worked. The obvious route would have been I-45 or I-69 (all north).”
After Katrina, Houstonians were more scared of the possible outcome of a hurricane, and this motivated a lot more people to evacuate when Rita came in September 2005, just a month after Katrina destroyed New Orleans. Keep in mind also that there were perhaps hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents that had relocated to Houston at that point. People panicked.
What a lot of people did not take into account is that New Orleans is below sea level. Houston is not. But Houston is very flat. It takes a long time to drain off massive amounts of water here. Anyway, people left town when they did not necessarily need to.
I was in a mandatory evacuation county (Brazoria). I was asked to be a backup driver for a group of 3 busses leaving from my little town. I ended up taking a bus load to College Station. When the freeways became impassible I resorted to back roads for the entire trip. The other two bus drivers decided they did not want to follow me, and they got back on the freeway. They ended up taking twelve hours longer than me and having a tough time finding any available shelter that was not full. My drive was about 14 hours for what would ordinarily take about 2. This was partly due to being stuck for hours behind a car wreck when it was almost impossible for emergency vehicles to come clear it.
I learned a lot from this experience. Trying to put too many people on the road at once results in stand-still traffic and lots of potential damage. If this had been repeated this time, there might have been more fatalities because we’ve had freeways under 10 feet or more of water this time. Another thing I learned was that back roads are faster in a mass evacuation. (Unfortunately, law enforcement usually block off roads in such a way to force traffic onto the freeways.)
What should have happened in this case (with Harvey) is a voluntary evacuation in which people in areas prone to flooding are encouraged and assisted to leave town. This did not happen.
And with the millions being spent on planning and preparedness, we should have better technology in place. Dangerous roads could easily be mapped, and a smart app could be developed that would safely guide evacuees out of town. If this were implemented it would be possible to get millions of residents out of town fairly efficiently if that became necessary.
“Somewhere in the back of all this evac-talk....one has to wonder where they would have housed two or three million people, and how this would have worked. The obvious route would have been I-45 or I-69 (all north).”
After Katrina, Houstonians were more scared of the possible outcome of a hurricane, and this motivated a lot more people to evacuate when Rita came in September 2005, just a month after Katrina destroyed New Orleans. Keep in mind also that there were perhaps hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents that had relocated to Houston at that point. People panicked.
What a lot of people did not take into account is that New Orleans is below sea level. Houston is not. But Houston is very flat. It takes a long time to drain off massive amounts of water here. Anyway, people left town when they did not necessarily need to.
I was in a mandatory evacuation county (Brazoria). I was asked to be a backup driver for a group of 3 busses leaving from my little town. I ended up taking a bus load to College Station. When the freeways became impassible I resorted to back roads for the entire trip. The other two bus drivers decided they did not want to follow me, and they got back on the freeway. They ended up taking twelve hours longer than me and having a tough time finding any available shelter that was not full. My drive was about 14 hours for what would ordinarily take about 2. This was partly due to being stuck for hours behind a car wreck when it was almost impossible for emergency vehicles to come clear it.
I learned a lot from this experience. Trying to put too many people on the road at once results in stand-still traffic and lots of potential damage. If this had been repeated this time, there might have been more fatalities because we’ve had freeways under 10 feet or more of water this time. Another thing I learned was that back roads are faster in a mass evacuation. (Unfortunately, law enforcement usually block off roads in such a way to force traffic onto the freeways.)
What should have happened in this case (with Harvey) is a voluntary evacuation in which people in areas prone to flooding are encouraged and assisted to leave town. This did not happen.
And with the millions being spent on planning and preparedness, we should have better technology in place. Dangerous roads could easily be mapped, and a smart app could be developed that would safely guide evacuees out of town. If this were implemented it would be possible to get millions of residents out of town fairly efficiently if that became necessary.
And that, my friend, is why I wouldn’t have stayed nearby. Kansas or New Mexico would be likely locations for me, well away from places that might overfill, like Dallas, San Antonio or Austin.