At least 14 people have died in the floods resulting from Hurricane Harvey and the story is playing as a battle with two distinct sides.
One one side, you have people who say Houston should have been evacuated.
Greg Abbot, the Republican governor of Texas, went on television to urge the people of Houston to evacuate even though a mandatory evacuation had not been requested by the city. Around the web, non-Texans (and even Texans from outside the Houston area) are asking why Houston didn’t evacuate. If they had, we wouldn’t have photos of elderly people sitting in flood waters waiting for rescue, we wouldn’t have photos of families sitting on their rooftops waiting for rescue, and we wouldn’t have 14 victims who didn’t have enough time to wait for rescue. There was ample time to prepare before the storm – hurricanes don’t move all that fast – and the weather models predicted that this storm would make landfall, sit, and just dump tons of water. Houston is a very flat city at a very low elevation sitting very close to the water. It’s also a growing city with a lot of pavement, which means there’s less ground to soak up excess water. The streets and highways unfortunately serve as flood control to funnel the water down to the bayou, but as soon as the streets are full, the houses flood. None of this is new information, so a lot of people are asking why Houston didn’t evacuate.
On the other side, we have people who stand by the position that telling Houston’s residents to stay put was the right idea.
Mayor Sylvester Turner is a Democrat, and I say this because everything is a partisan argument in this country and a lot of the arguments from the Fox News audience are blaming “the liberals” for making bad decisions and causing fourteen people to die. Turner is standing by his decision not to issue an evacuation order because logistically, it would have been a nightmare to send seven million people north to safety. By his and others’ logic, the best course of action before a hurricane is to simply stay put. The phrase evacuation experts use is, “Run from water, hide from wind,” and the water refers to storm surge, not rain. Unless you are in the direct path of a hurricane in an area that will be affected by catastrophic waves as the hurricane makes landfall, the best course of action for major metropolitan areas is to simply reinforce your windows, stock up on supplies, make sure you have an exit strategy to make it to your roof in case of flooding once the winds die down, and stay put.
And this is why:
Three million people left Houston before Hurricane Rita and over 100 people died because they tried to leave the city. There were more deaths attributed to Houton’s evacuation, as people sat in their hot cars dehydrated with no access to food and water for 36 hours or more, than to the actual hurricane which thankfully made landfall further east than predicted. Can you imagine if that hurricane had sped up and turned to the left to make a direct hit on Houston a day earlier while three million people were sitting in gridlock? Governor Rick Perry and other officials called the evacuation a success, but how successful is your evacuation if 100 people died in the process? Houston is currently suffering its worst flood in 800 years and only 14 people have died. So really, should a city that large evacuate ahead of a storm when the potential victim count is over 100 just from trying to leave?
There is another, smaller, group of voices wondering why Houston hadn’t learned to prepare for an evacuation after what happened during Rita. I do understand this group, but I also understand that this is not my field and I don’t know, logistically, how you can control and expedite a mass evacuation. During Rita, only 1.5 million people were ordered to evacuate – the other 1.5 million just decided on their own to get up and go. That’s double what was planned for because you can’t really control what people are going to do. The city had an orderly plan to stagger the exits out of the city, but who followed them? People left when they felt like it. Everyone has their own car and their own free will and made their own decision to hop on the highway when it suited them.
A mass evacuation isn’t feasible once a city without an extensive rail system hits a certain population size. I think if a powerful hurricane was set to make landfall right on top of Manhattan, this city could in fact organize a mass exit inland to New Jersey or north into Westchester in less than 12 hours. I know this to be true because every single day, the population of Manhattan doubles from about 1.6 million to over 3 million as people come in from the surrounding area to go to work (that number moves closer to 4 million if you count tourists and visitors). That’s well over a million people coming in every single day in span of about two hours (between 8am and 10am) with no plan or schedule, alongside others just passing through Manhattan to go elsewhere. You cannot shuffle that many people by car which is what you would be trying to do in Houston.
But I do wonder what an in-city evacuation would look like. Instead of trying to get millions of people out of the city, would it be feasible to reorganize within the city to move people to higher ground? The people being rescued are being taken somewhere – should everyone have been moved before the rain even started to prevent the need for a rescue? If there was to be a direct hit, what does an evacuation using buses instead of individual cars look like? Would people be able to move around as quickly as they do here on the trains? I’m sure these questions have been asked by people qualified to find the answers, but I can’t find any of the public results or discussions, so if y’all come across info I might find interesting, pass it along.
At any rate, it should be clear that Mayor Turner made the right call. We’ve seen what a mass evacuation out of Houston looks like, and the only thing that has changed between then and now is an additional 1.3 million people added to the metro area. I think we can expect more extreme weather events like these for Houston and other coastal cities from Miami to Charleston to Baltimore and up through NYC and Boston. If the decision is between evacuate and stay put, for most people the answer should be “stay put.” Hopefully there’s a third option somewhere that city planners and emergency personnel are working on to come up with together.
Not just that but Houston itself is a huge city spanning some odd 40-50 miles in diameter. We’re not as dense as most metropolitan cities in the US. The city also has inconsistent floodplains. Some areas handle floods better, while others don’t. This is also Houston’s 3rd flood in 3 years that has been very impactful. With the major difference of Hurricane Harvey depositing at least 9 trillion gallons of water on our population of 6.6 million.
Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund-
There are a multitude of people(myself included) who are concerned about Houston’s recovery period. Insurance is going to be crazy here and gas is going to have a major spike in prices. Lots of people have lost their jobs, their cars, their belongings, their homes and there was not much we could do to circumvent that.
If you want to help my city(that I’m currently stranded in!) you can donate to the following local groups:
These are just a few of the many programs that are working to help Houston. I advise against Red Cross after the whole Haiti ordeal. I also advise some caution with the Salvation Army since it has a sketchy history with supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Please pray for my home and my people. We really need it.
Lady Jace Of The Fae 