KPRC TV (at
www.click2houston.com) the NBC affilliate there in Houston is interviewing people who ran out of gas and have just decided to camp it in the mall parking lots until more gas shows up or the storm hits.
They interviewed a family in a parking lot 5 miles from my family's home. They just gave up, but cant go back to Beaumont, because thats now the expected landfall.
If I can play armchair quarterback for a moment, there are/were so many things that have gone with this evacuation:
1) When they only ordered evacuations of the low lying areas, they expected everyone else to stay put...but told them to 'run from the water, hide from the wind. Expect winds of an approximately F3 Tornado. Just hide (no one in Houston has basements). If
you knew there was an F3 tornado coming in three days, would you stay put?
2) They are not offering any shelters there in Houston. That forces people to get on the road if they dont trust the structural integerity of their houses.
3) They dictated where people could evacuate to, regardless of where they wanted to go or had friends or family, or could even find a place to go.
4) TxDOT's (Texas Department of Transportation) REFUSAL to open contraflow until 1PM this afternoon, some 22 Hours after the freeways were first gridlocked.
5) There was no method for making sure gas stations had fuel. They were relying on market forces alone to do the job. In emergency situations, the govmt needs to step in to insure that provisions are made available.
6) The freeway system sucks in houston. Its not from a lack of funding either. They receive 35% of the states entire construction budget each year. Its always been notoriusly bad, but as I said earlier, you have a situation simular to NOLA where you have a large number of people needing to get out of town, but only four freeways that dont put people into harms way. There would have been a fifth direction, but that leads to New Orleans and you can only get so far. Again, you have 2 million people needing to get through a city of 4 million for an evacuation.
7) They are still trying to figure out what to do with the people out of gas on the side of the road and they are quickly running out of time to craft a solution. The first rains are supposed to drop in downtown Houston at 3PM, so that leaves 14 hours to come to a decision and rescue these people or supply them with fuel.
8) Why didnt the airlines bring in extra planes and crews when they openly tell people that they have an excess capacity of planes and crews due to the limited service to NOLA. (Specifically, SWA). They could make a good chunk of change. There are people who want to leave and would pay to do so. Also, did they not expect lots of the TSA people to bail? They have families too.
9) the simple knowledge that 2 million plus people cant leave a city in 48 hours.
I am glad there were lots of lessons learned after Katrina. Can ya'll imagine what this would be like if this was
before Katrina?
It does look like the contraflow plan is working. traffic in some areas has dramatically improved. However this does not help the people who are out of fuel or who's cars died.
What on earth....
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