Houston’s Mayor Was Right to Not Evacuate

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.

It was a a nightmare experience that should always be avoided.

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.

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.

[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...

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.

[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...

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.

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.

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.

There's plenty of nasty stuff in US politics as well. This article is refreshing.

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."

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.