White House thinks Houston evacuation went well!!!

[Morag]

Do they not have a plan for the evacuation of the 4th largest city in America in the event of an attack by terrorists? Might part of that plan involve having fuel and water trucks available for the fleeing populace --or at least under orders to show up when they are needed? (The firefighters and police who responded on 9/11 knew to show up without being personally called by the Mayor.) Very little differentiation need be made between natural disasters and terror events when the issue is removing millions of citizens from danger.

Bring back FEMA as it was. "Emergency Management" is not just a meaningless phrase. It makes no sense to expect every mayor/governor/local official to develop a completely separate plan; do you really expect your village elders to rescue you off your roof or to air-drop food parcels to you when disaster strikes? Emergency management and disaster relief, like military action, are services which must be co-ordinated from the top down.

And these services do not appear to be included in the federal response, other than on an ad hoc basis. Why wasn't the Homeland Security chief telling Governor Perry to get that contra flow going earlier, or FEMA newguy getting water, fuel, and medical trucks on the road to service the freeway population ( a city of two million for around 15-20 hours)?

We have the right to expect that our government (at all levels) be prepared to deal with human misery on a large scale--isn't that what Security means in Homeland Security?

The party hacks and well-meaning bureaucrats who have been running the Homeland Security Department have not done their job. Had the storm not slowed and veered, the cars on those highways could have been out of gas and under water. What is the plan to evacuate Houston and other cities in the event of a terror attack or other event which occurs totally without warning?

 

[BarnGoddess]

Morag, you bring up a lot of interesting items, especially firefighters and police reporting automatically, but the fact is, the evacuations and first responses are still the responsibility of the local and state governments until the federal government is asked to come in. It's the law. The feds can't just show up and take over. They may suggest and offer help, but until laws are changed, individual states still have jurisdiction and responsibility for their citizens. The federal agencies are not blameless for their poor planning and response when they were called in, that I will agree with you.

Our local fire chief has a son who now lives in Waco, TX. He was called by his former fire chief in Lake Charles and left to go there on Wednesday. He's still there helping out. Obviously, the Lake Charles emergency management teams took their local response seriously, putting outside personnel in place before the storm hit. Also, the 9-11 response was done locally in New York, by New Yorkers. The mayor acted immediately without having to call Washington to find out what to do.

 

[Marthatex]

Most people I talk to around here, including some who came up from Houston agree that the contra lanes should have been changed alot sooner, at the very least.

I'm glad I didn't have to go through what Houston people did, but I went out and got prepared for a power outage for several days and helped my children do so. It took about 2 days; and next time I hope we'll be more prepared for something ahead of time.

As I pointed out, the hurricane veered to the right, or things would have been much worse in Houston, especially for those who didn't get out.

 

[Details]

I'd say it did go well.

Not perfectly, not that there isn't room for improvement, but a huge number of people were moved in a short amount of time, even with the people not fully cooperating with the evacuation plan (waiting until later when they needed to be moving earlier). It's a huge difficult, near impossible task. Given that, how it turned out is pretty darn good.

 

[GonzoReiter]

Hurricane planners have a little ditty that goes, "run from the water, hide from the wind."

It means evacuate if you are in a coastal surge area, but hunker down if you are in an area that will get hurricane-force winds and rain only.

The biggest problem in Houston's painful evacuation last week was that perhaps a million people, almost half of those who left, ran from the wind. To make matters worse, the regional evacuation plan was missing a key element — pre-planned contraflow lanes that are a part of virtually every other hurricane-prone city's evacuation strategy.

From Corpus Christi to Norfolk, Va., most vulnerable cities have pre-set plans to run their highways in one direction only, headed out of town, said Brian Wolshon, a civil engineer at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center.

Wolshon gave a presentation on the subject at Houston's TranStar traffic management center two years ago, but found that officials were reluctant because Houston's freeway grid is much more complicated than other coastal cities.

"I don't think they really took it seriously," he said.

The evacuation shows more need to stay put, and all lanes should be outbound

 

[Marthatex]

Constructive criticism is good, I believe, because the "fire drill" exposed the cracks in the plan, which hopefully be corrected if there is another time this has to be done.

As Senator Joseph Lieberman said: "We need to be better prepared. the nightmare that we all have is that, God forbid, there's a terrorist attack of some kind on a major American city that requires evacuation without warning".

Los Angeles officials concede that they don't have proper plans for a mass evacuation or shelter for those left homeless by an earthquake or terrorist attack.

Milwaukee leaders realized they have misplaced their evacuation plan, devised during the Cold War.

Where have our Homeland Security dollars gone? Well much of it was or will be paid to State and local governments to establish, well, Homeland Security. I guess it's up to us to find out and hold our local governments accountable.

I think the amounts allotted have been relatively small because of what we have to pay for the Iraq war. The school for public policy here should be able to tell me where the dollars have gone, and I plan to find out.

 

[KT Can]

:clap: :clap: :clap:

You got it!

There is always room for improvement, in anything, but I think the problems encountered were to be expected.

Ditto the responses by Jules, Jeana and Kato.....

 

[Marthatex]

Well I wish I knew what everybody is smokin' today.

The Houston mayor said that part of the Texas evacuation plan was to provide gas tanks or tankers along the roads so people wouldn't run out of gas. He said for one reason or another they weren't sure of this wasn't carried out.

Chevron-Texaco shut down on Thursday; they said they had not ever received a message to provide gasoline. This was before the evacuation really began. The ones who were smart were the ones who stayed home; but that might not be an option next time. It needs to be done better in the case of a terrorist attack or a direct hit hurricane.