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).
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.
It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.
The level of vitriol targeted towards the mayor, usually referred to as "democratic mayor Sylvester Turner", on the internet during the height of this disaster is pretty disgusting.
In hindsight, it worked out OK for most people. Most of the time it does. The problem is that sometimes it turns out really really bad. I'm from Florida and I worked in construction during college. I was down in South Florida after Andrew. Ground zero was like a warzone. No street signs, traffic lights, etc. Almost every single house was missing a roof. There was no place to buy fuel, food, and water. I saw a lot of human misery. Especially among the poorer population. It was like this for months because of the scale of devastation. We still feel the effects of Andrew in FL. We probably have the most stringent building codes in the country and the highest insurance rates.
Major catastrophes like Andrew and Katrina are black swans. Nobody predicts the level of devastation ahead of time. It's usually hindisght, like "it was so obvious!". Therefore, I think it's ignorant to not at least advise people to evacuate at some point. Maybe not 2 hours before the storm hits. Days maybe? They always do advise evacuation of coastal regions here in FL. I always listen too.
Agreed. I was stuck as a tourist evacuating out of the South Carolina lowcountry, which has dramatically fewer people during the general evacuation for Matthew.
It was a a nightmare experience that should always be avoided.
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.
You are spot on. My parents live in Houston and during a past hurricane they were told to evacuate. They made it 2 miles from their house in 6 hours. When Houston floods, there are often not many obvious routes to take with passable roads. They eventually turned around and went home where they would be safer than stranded on a freeway.
I was in Tropical Storm Allison in Houston. Within a few hours that I was at a concert, we went from light rain to the nearby freeway exit being 20 feet under water. We spent the night in a medical office building because we could find any passable route out of a 2 mile radius. My car was swept away into a drainage ditch and filled with water.
People are better off staying home or moving to a nearby high-ground area. Than riding out a hurricane in a car in traffic.
Was stuck in the same horrible jam, too, finally bailed out and spent the night at a rest area, never saw one so full. Some part of the traffic was caused by poor planning on Illinois' part, having massive construction on 57 at the most inappropriate time.
They will oftentimes have a plan for evacuation that has been modeled ahead of time. Of course, they may not follow this plan.
They should shut down inbound highways and use both sides for routing traffic out of the affected area. They should keep the breakdown lanes free of all obstructions to allow shuttles to have bi-directional traffic. Don't tow, or repair, personal vehicles that break down, shove them off the paved surface and put the people on the shuttles. Etc...
Outbound traffic, properly routed, can be done quite rapidly. It takes cooperation and isn't very polite. It's also going to be a political disaster if the emergency turns out to have not been as bad as expected.
you don't even need to imagine it; hurricane rita had over 100 evacuation-related fatalities, and i'm sure contributed a lot to the decision that evacuation was a bad idea this time.
In Florida it is standard procedure to order evacuation of ANY city facing direct impact by hurricane. Florida, unlike Texas, is a heavily populated peninsula with only two or three major interstates leading out of the state. Do not tell me Houston is incapable of evacuation. It's no bigger than Miami and Houston residents have many more directions to disperse than Floridians.
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.
That train could evacuate 15K people a day.
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).
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.
This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In Japan those trains could easily make 100-200 round trips a day. And there would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.
Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities?
Three times a day? That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.
But at this time they know the specifically affected areas where people face the danger of rising waters --but mayor still had not called for evacuation. Not a general evacuation, but evacs from the most affected areas in imminent danger. Even NPR is questioning the present stance[1]
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.
I was living in Houston at the time and I was in one of those cars stuck in the freeway. It took us roughly 40 hours to reach Dallas.
It is also important to mention that we were fleeing Hurricane Rita (category 5 at some point), only a month after Hurricane Katrina. Memories of the damages caused by Hurricane Katrina played a major role in our decision to evacuate.
NPR touches on this[1], while they agree that putting people on gridlocked highways is counterproductive, they do wonder why the mayor had yet to call for an evacuation when it was now clear where people should evacuate from. Being that they now know the areas in danger and the areas not.
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.
Evacuation doesn't have to mean all 6.5 million have to leave, just those in low lying areas. It also doesn't have to mean leaving the city, It looks like the downtown area has plenty of tall buildings that would make for some high density evacuation areas and have rooftop helicopter access for emergencies and food/water drops.
The problem with any evacuation plan that requires more than 48 hours of notice is two-fold:
1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead.
2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention.
An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens.
And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere.
And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita.
My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit.
During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again.
If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched.
Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again.
I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them.
They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying.
A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better.
But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
> would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita
Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts or of flood-resistant design. Anything from a rudimentary elevated home to a fully adjustable Narita-style hydraulic lift system...
Don't live in a flood plane, leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.
Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor.
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?
If I read the article correctly, most of the flooding is due to heavy rains, not storm surge. Even in Singapore, predicting which areas will be flooded due to heavy rains isn't easy, judging from the number of local reports of floods after heavy rains. This will make it difficult to judge which areas to evacuate.
This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."
I'm still, as a Floridian, having a hard time understanding why evacuation is not an option. We have evacuated large cities in Florida many times over the past decades. We have no trains either and more distance to travel to get to total safety than Texans. This comes down to preparation and Houston & Texas dropped the ball.
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.
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.
None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.
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.
Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?
Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside?
Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.
[+] [-] jccooper|8 years ago|reply
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.
It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.
[+] [-] Rapzid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanackley|8 years ago|reply
Major catastrophes like Andrew and Katrina are black swans. Nobody predicts the level of devastation ahead of time. It's usually hindisght, like "it was so obvious!". Therefore, I think it's ignorant to not at least advise people to evacuate at some point. Maybe not 2 hours before the storm hits. Days maybe? They always do advise evacuation of coastal regions here in FL. I always listen too.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
It was a a nightmare experience that should always be avoided.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sprokolopolis|8 years ago|reply
I was in Tropical Storm Allison in Houston. Within a few hours that I was at a concert, we went from light rain to the nearby freeway exit being 20 feet under water. We spent the night in a medical office building because we could find any passable route out of a 2 mile radius. My car was swept away into a drainage ditch and filled with water.
People are better off staying home or moving to a nearby high-ground area. Than riding out a hurricane in a car in traffic.
[+] [-] Jun8|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
They should shut down inbound highways and use both sides for routing traffic out of the affected area. They should keep the breakdown lanes free of all obstructions to allow shuttles to have bi-directional traffic. Don't tow, or repair, personal vehicles that break down, shove them off the paved surface and put the people on the shuttles. Etc...
Outbound traffic, properly routed, can be done quite rapidly. It takes cooperation and isn't very polite. It's also going to be a political disaster if the emergency turns out to have not been as bad as expected.
[+] [-] zem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamnotlarry|8 years ago|reply
That train could evacuate 15K people a day.
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).
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.
[+] [-] dheera|8 years ago|reply
This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In Japan those trains could easily make 100-200 round trips a day. And there would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.
Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities? Three times a day? That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...
[+] [-] xbmcuser|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionmanu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...
[+] [-] org3432|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terravion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trynewideas|8 years ago|reply
1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead.
2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention.
An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens.
And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere.
And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita.
My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit.
During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again.
If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched.
Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again.
I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them.
They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying.
A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better.
But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|8 years ago|reply
Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
[+] [-] keehun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|8 years ago|reply
Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
[+] [-] thewhitetulip|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Buge|8 years ago|reply
There's plenty of nasty stuff in US politics as well. This article is refreshing.
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sohkamyung|8 years ago|reply
This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."
[+] [-] dabei|8 years ago|reply
What happens when a disaster that's 10x or 100x bigger comes?
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] designcode|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xname2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balance_factor|8 years ago|reply
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.
None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.
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.
[+] [-] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside?
Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.
[+] [-] notruthallowed|8 years ago|reply
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