I think the massive flooding and destruction in NC by Mathew was caused by only 1/2 to 1/3 the rainfall TX is may see. Holy shit!
Trump: If McConnell had passed ObamaCare, Harvey would never ever have happened. Obama is still cursing us with his Kenyan Voodoo.
Hang in there, Houston. KY Air National Guard is on the way!
I guess they are doing this a lot earlier than they did with Mathew due to the higher rain amounts. But if they wait to long I guess they have less control or risk breakage. Never bodes well at all for folks down stream.
Government representatives in life threatening crises: “Shelter in place.” New translation: “Just die where you are.”
See the Grenfell Towers disaster and now Houston. Too hard to evacuate 7 million people? Try rescuing 7 million people. If a thorough investigation were undertaken (pun intended), I’m certain some people who called 911 for help will be found to be no longer among the living.
The European models were predicting 5 feet of rain last week, but the American models had to be a bit more palatable.
Shameful.
This was the scene from Hurricane Rita which had more people die in the evacuation than from the hurricane itself. had there been an attempt to move that number of people out of the way of Harvey, they would have been stranded on highways that are under water.
There will be plenty of time to review decisions, but now is not the time for it.
Read this for some perspective of the volume that we’re dealing with…
(And yes, I’m a bit cranky from being stuck in this - but thankful to be one of the lucky ones.)
I side with the Mayor on this one. You evacuate when a hurricane is aimed right at you and you are afraid of storm surge. Harvey wasn’t aimed at Houston. It came ashore much further south. Storm surge was not a problem for Houston. The flooding, while very, very bad, was not the kind of flooding encountered in Katrina. That is why the loss of life is relatively low this time. I would have issued selective evacuation orders for those low lying areas near the river I knew would flood, but I wouldn’t have evacuated the entire city. More traffic deaths could have been anticipated if you put everybody on the freeways out of town.
Local news reporting that a family of six drowned in Northeast Houston. God rest their souls.
ETA, so far, no one else has reported this. Hopefully it was a mistaken report.
Interesting, although it could probably be argued that if all those folks had stayed, the additional killed by the hurricane may have exceeded the number in evacuation. However death and driving by humans are pretty interrelated. Kind of a crap shoot.
Agreed. Far more people died during the evacuations before Rita, in which huge numbers of people voluntarily evacuated because it happened shortly after Katrina and folks panicked, than in the hurricane itself. The rule for hurricanes here is “run from water, hide from wind,” which means evacuate if you are in a storm surge flood area, and otherwise, shelter from wind.
For Harvey, they did do limited mandatory evacuations from known flood zones, but there was no way of knowing which areas will be most impacted from this rain and areas that have never flooded before have flooded. The two reservoirs from which they are releasing water have existed since the mid-1940s and have never had to have a controlled release before.
Also, note that the City of Houston is only a small part of the greater Houston area, which includes Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, and other counties. Harris County coordinates much of the response, but each of the counties make their own evacuation decisions.
There’s also room for a statement to the effect of “with the benefit of hindsight, we should have evacuated, but we think we made the best decision we could based on what we knew at the time” (I don’t know if they should have - I’m no expert on the Houston metro).
Sometimes good, intelligent people make decisions that turn out to be bad. They can be learning experiences without the need for recrimination or finger-pointing. In point of fact, nobody alive has ever seen a storm like this hit Houston, and Jesus Christ wouldn’t get every last detail right the first time.