Please don’t complain about the lack of an evacuation

There are good reasons why there was not an evacuation order for the greater Houston area in advance of Harvey.

Ultimately, mayors and county judges are charged with making such decisions. Leaders in Houston and Harris County told residents to stay put ahead of the storm and have since defended those decisions — even as bayous spill into the streets in what might be the worst flood event the area has ever seen.

“To suggest that we should have evacuated 2 million people is an outrageous statement,” Harris County Judge Emmett told CNN on Sunday.

Emmett and others have offered a litany of reasons for hunkering down. That includes the reality that such a mass evacuation can turn into logistical nightmare with huge safety risks of its own.

“People disproportionately die in cars from floods, so evacuation is not as straightforward a call as seems,” Marshall Shepherd, a program director in atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia, tweeted Sunday.

Shepherd pointed to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showing that drivers accounted for 66 percent of U.S. flood fatalities in 2014.

For a vivid example of what can go wrong in a large-scale evacuation, Texans can look twelve years back to Hurricane Rita, when more than 3 million people from south and southeast Texas set off on one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history.

The backdrop of that blistering summer in 2005: Just three weeks earlier, Hurricane Katrina had submerged New Orleans and killed 1,200 people when Rita barreled toward the coastline. Texans didn’t want to stick around to see how Rita would compare, so they bolted — or tried to.

Traffic jams stretched across hundreds of miles over two days, and many people ran out of gas. Dozens died from accidents and heat-related illnesses, all before Rita even made landfall.

Of the 139 deaths that the state linked to Hurricane Rita, 73 occurred before the storm hit Texas. Twenty-three people died in a bus fire. Ten others died from hyperthermia due to heat exposure. In the years since Rita, state and local officials say new laws and better planning would help the state’s next evacuation go more smoothly, but Houston mayor Sylvester Turner this weekend indicated Rita’s legacy factored into his decision.

“You cannot put, in the city of Houston, 2.3 million people on the road…That is dangerous,” he said in a press conference Sunday. “If you think the situation right now is bad — you give an order to evacuate, you create a nightmare.”

Emmett, the Harris County Judge, has pointed to additional factors in defense of calls to stay, drawing distinctions between danger from Harvey — primarily rainfall — and the hurricanes that struck before it.

“When we have hurricanes, we know who to evacuate, because you have a storm surge coming, and we have that down to a very fine art,” he told CNN Sunday. “In this case, we have a rain event. Unless you know where the rain is going to fall, we don’t know who to evacuate.”

I agree with everything Judge Emmett and Mayor Turner have said about this, and I say that as someone who did evacuate during Hurricane Rita. One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in this conversation is that if Houston evacuates, it means that all of Galveston and Texas City and La Marque and Dickinson wind up being in line behind us. In a situation where storm surge is an issue, that’s really not a good thing. Bear in mind also, that as recently as Saturday afternoon, after landfall in Rockport, it was not clear exactly what path Harvey would take. It was entirely possible that Harvey would be a big-but-not-catastrophic rainmaker on Houston. How do you justify evacuating millions of people for that? Never mind where they would go.

There may come a time, God forbid, when Houston will truly need to evacuate for an apocalyptic hurricane aimed at us. If that happens, we’ll know it when we see it. In the meantime, as big and bad as Harvey has been, Judge Emmett and Mayor Turner made the right call. If you still need convincing, go read Kam Franklin. She says what I’m saying with far more poetry. (A version with less cussing is here, if you prefer.)

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8 Responses to Please don’t complain about the lack of an evacuation

  1. Flypusher says:

    I agree 10,000% as someone else who was caught in the Rita bugout (I’m in the evacuation zone for “the big one”). As bad as hunkering down on the second floor with no power or even heading to the roof for hours or even days is, it’s still now where near as bad as being in a car on a grid-locked freeway as the waters rise. When your choice is very, very, very, very bad or bad ^10, pick the former.

    During Rita, some people I knew in Dickinson (a place that absolutely MUST evacuate) tried to get to the Lake Livingston area. It took them over 23 hours.

  2. Mark says:

    Hope you and your family are safe Kuff.

  3. Robbie Westmoreland says:

    Also, as bad as this has been, the majority of people in the metro area have not had water enter their housing, nor lost power. Mandatory evacuations are for guaranteed imminent flooding (for example, New Territory development near the Brazos right now), storm surge, and very very high winds.

  4. Flypusher says:

    Watching Mayor Turner’s press conference- the people who have done nothing but talk just got told!

  5. Flypusher says:

    WaPo gives Ted Cruz 3 Pinocchios for his justifications for voting “no” on superstorm Sandy relief. But everyone should already know that Cruz is a self-serving, 2-faced, grandstanding hypocrite. Let’s get him out of office.

  6. Mainstream says:

    If everyone in the Heights and Montrose and other neighborhoods with only localized flooding had chosen to evacuate, lots of folks from coastal areas avoiding storm surge risks would likely have died on flooded freeways. I do plan to buy a better ladder to get to my roof if I really must ever do so. And place more valuable items higher on shelves.

  7. Mainstream says:

    If everyone in the Heights and Montrose and other neighborhoods with only localized flooding had chosen to evacuate, lots of folks from coastal areas avoiding storm surge risks would likely have died on flooded freeways. I do plan to buy a better ladder to get to my roof if I really must ever do so. And place more valuable items higher on shelves.

  8. Mainstream says:

    If everyone in the Heights and Montrose and other neighborhoods with only localized flooding had chosen to evacuate, lots of folks from coastal areas avoiding storm surge risks would likely have died on flooded freeways. I do plan to buy a better ladder to get to my roof if I really must ever do so. And place more valuable items higher on shelves.

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