***Houston evacuation plans required A FEW DAYS' NOTICE before landfall, & STATE HELP***

[highplainsdem]

Re all the questions about whether there was an evacuation order, and if so why not...

This Houston Chronicle article from last summer explains the detailed evacuation plan:

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/explainer/article/houston-hurricane-evacuation-emergency-disaster-8346636.php

It requires more time than they had. It requires being able to evacuate people to the west as well as north.

It requires being able to get a fleet of emergency buses from the state of Texas -- a fleet normally housed in San Antonio. Those are needed first to help those who can't help themselves.

The first to go are people who need help. People who are disabled, who cannot drive, who can't afford gas or otherwise need assistance can put their names on the Texas Emergency Assistance Registry so that when disaster strikes, the authorities come knocking on their door.

"Our primary concern is making sure we have buses available for those people who don't have vehicles available to evacuate," Walter said.

The state sends a fleet of emergency buses that are normally housed in San Antonio, he said. Ambulances and Houston Metro vehicles can also join the effort.

Then the evacuation unfolds in a stepwise fashion according to a zoned map, which was refined after an earlier evacuation plan caused confusion in the run-up to Hurricane Rita.

The governor started talking about evacuation a couple of days ago, no doubt hoping to spare himself any blame.

I don't recall hearing about any attempts to send those buses to Houston.

So the governor apparently explected a mass evacuation of Houston without the plans they'd put in place, without the time they needed.

[highplainsdem]

1. kick

[politicat]

2. K&R

This storm blew up fast, and then decided to settle in. Evac was almost impossible from the moment it became a hurricane.

[highplainsdem]

9. Agree completely about the lack of time. And thanks for the K&R!

[herding cats]

3. Great info.

I've bookmarked this.

[LeftInTX]

4. There were concerns about evacuating after Thursday

There were concerns that I-10 going towards San Antonio would be dangerous on Friday.

My son and his wife drove in on Friday morning, but I told them to leave Houston on Thursday. They turned out to be OK.

Harvey made landfall closer to San Antonio than Houston

[highplainsdem]

11. Glad they made it out safely. But imagine if millions had been trying to leave at once on Friday,

without a properly managed, staged evacuation.

[LeftInTX]

12. Especially with a Cat 3 approaching the evacuation route

[mcar]

5. The AA Democratic mayor of Houston is being scapegoated

While the RWNJ gov praises Trump for all his help.

They never stop their cruel politics.

[highplainsdem]

6. Yep. And when that SOB Abbott suggested evacuation, he already knew it was too late for a mass

evacuation to be successful. He COULD have told reporters on Friday, when he "suggested" evacuating, that the mass evacuastion would have had to start the day before, with state buses already in Houston if not leaving already by Friday. But he didn't. He made the "suggestion" to get himself in the clear and dump the blame on the mayor.

[malaise]

7. Isn't sabotaged a better word?

Why didn't the governor order that the buses be sent to Houston?

[highplainsdem]

8. Good question.

[mcar]

10. Like I said, cruel politics

[Igel]

14. To what end.

People are missing an important point here.

Houston's at risk due to flooding, but most of the flooding isn't in the areas that are most important in the evacuation plan. It assumes flooding mostly from storm surge coming up Galveston Bay and from flood waters that can't drain into the bay due to storm surge. Most of the areas affected by Harvey aren't priorities. The graduated evacuation that is in place (but which is hardly well-understood by most of us) assumes that those who need to get out first are closest to the bay.

As for buses, if Turner said "no" they'd get here and turn around. If I'd been Turner that's what I'd have done. (And he did say 'no', which was the right decision.)

This is a lot like the Tax Day and Memorial Day floods in that it's all rainwater. It's worse, but a lot of the areas affected are 100 feet above sea level and 30 miles from any storm surge.

A lot of the areas are near storm-surge areas or would be affected by a storm surge, but are flooded now because they've gotten 25 inches of rain in 40 hours and the land's so flat that it can't all drain off quickly enough. That's Baytown, Deer Park, out near San Jacinto CC.

A colleague's house is flooded not because a creek's overflowing near her, but because the drainage pond dug to drain the roads and yards filled up and the culvert that allows it to drain simply isn't large enough. All the streets drain into it. The creek that the drainage system flows into just reached flood stage 20 minutes ago (I love real-time flood gauge sensors) and won't exceed the greenway around the slough for another few feet of vertical elevation, but 30 or 40 houses already had a few inches of standing water in them hours ago. The area was stupidly re-graded in the '80s when a very nice subdivision was put in and the natural flow of water altered. The HOA learned of the problem during the floods in spring '15 but decided that there wasn't much likelihood of the problem occurring so quickly. There's going to be hell to pay at the next HOA.

[politicat]

17. Most municipalities are working on historical records.

As the financial advisors say, "past performance is not a predictor of future performance." For most of the country, we only have really good meteorological records for 100-150 years. We have little idea what day to day weather looked like during, say, the last really big ENSO or even during 1816's volcanic winter.

The planet hasn't had this much excess energy in the atmosphere in tens of thousands of years. We can't use the last century's blip to predict anything. We have to look at every single block and building and think about them as both worst case scenario, and most efficient use of materials, time, tools and talent.

We've got the computational power to do the modeling. It's just the money and the will to consider it important.

[OBrien]

13. Exactly

I live in Houston and it is impossible to evacuate everyone. Also, impossible to tell where it was going to flood. Abbot offered no plan at all. It was his responsibility not the mayor's. Hearing Abbot's press conference the obvious talking point assigned is the "quick response of the federal government ". He is a soulless bastard.

[Igel]

15. Not how the law's written.

Houston as an evacuation plan. It's on file with the state and was developed in coordination with the federal government, but it's Houston's plan. A governor in a state as large as Texas can't on the fly produce evacuation plans for each city as the need arises. That's unreasonable, no matter how much we dislike Abbot. If we think he's substandard it's unreasonable to hold him to superhuman standards.

I'll say what I said when Katrina and Rita hit. I wouldn't want some people who are from Pennsylvania and who attended school at Yale sitting in DC making up evacuation plans based entirely on Houston flood-plan maps and the Thomas guide coupled with some demographic maps from the 2000 census. Austin might be a bit better, but it's hard to them to keep in mind everything. So since the last big push for an evacuation map in Houston we've put in the Grand Parkway to the north, which is a nice way to funnel a lot of people from 45 over to 249. Or vice-versa. Local planners would be able to take this into account much more readily than bureaucrats, albeit intelligent ones, in DC or Austin.

Houston doesn't have a serious corruption problem nor is it gridlocked by two sides each insistent on their views being the One True Path. We have intelligent people locally who know local conditions, can work for the common good, and for whom neighborhoods aren't shaded areas on a map and the local highway and surface-street systems are known quantities.

Nobody's on the hook for anything we could have done in the last few days. Houston's flooding is a long-term affair.

[OBrien]

16. I agree

We have intelligent hard working people here. I'm just afraid that Turner will somehow become a scapegoat.

[highplainsdem]

18. kick