Houston's a very large place, and while there's bad stuff going on in places, there are also large parts of the city--probably most of it--with no particular damage. I'm in the middle of it right now and know people and organizations all over and most have had little or no problem (though sadly I don't have to go too far in my social graph to find people who left their house via boat).<p>The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal.<p>It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.
I was stuck in traffic for 11 hours driving home to Chicago from the solar eclipse in Carbondale, IL. And I only made it half way home and had to stay overnight. That was the eclipse, not a massive natural disaster. I can't even imagine the secondary disaster a mass exodus might have been, with a million cars running out of gas.
Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours.<p>That train could evacuate 15K people a day.<p>Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets).<p>Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.
A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.
Here's the back story that the author mentions on the election. Great to see that partisanship still can be put aside at times. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015</a>
I definitely see that an emergency evacuation for ~6.5 million people would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita. I feel uncomfortable just scaling up for the rescue mission while people hang around. It seems way too reactive. I don't know if there's a more progressive evacuation model that works. I assume it's been tried and has possibly failed.
I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor.<p>had this been India, the opponent of the Mayor would have politicized the situation and asked for resignation of the mayor and claimed that it was a mistake to not evacuate.
Yeah I dunno if I like the false choice between "evacuate incompetently" and "don't evacuate at all." Could there maybe be a third option of evacuating only the relevant areas (low-lying ones near the bayous), safely and efficiently, via a well-thought-out plan?
The decision of not to evacuate seems justifiable. But the deeper problem is mass evacuation is not even an option.<p>What happens when a disaster that's 10x or 100x bigger comes?
There must be a lot of 'preppers' in Houston. Maybe it's too early, but does anyone know of any honest 'post mortems' of strategies that people choose beforehand and how it worked out?
The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety.<p>Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way.<p>None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.<p>Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.