Houston's a very large place, and while there's bad stuff going on in places, there are also large parts of the city--probably most of it--with no particular damage. I'm in the middle of it right now and know people and organizations all over and most have had little or no problem (though sadly I don't have to go too far in my social graph to find people who left their house via boat).
The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal.
It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.
The level of vitriol targeted towards the mayor, usually referred to as "democratic mayor Sylvester Turner", on the internet during the height of this disaster is pretty disgusting.
It's just a sign of political polarization. Like when people say the republican governor of Texas [did something not aligned with Democrat values] when discussing liberal ideas.
I'm not going to agree that both sides are the same. There's a serious problem with conservatives demonizing and even dehumanizing those who don't follow their ideology, which IMHO lays the foundation for current conservative leaders. In the U.S. and Europe you can't find significant liberal leaders nearly as extreme and polarizing as many major conservative figures, some of whom are heads of state, nor liberal equivalents for white supremacy and extreme nationalism that are anywhere close to having the support to win power. The left-wing equivalent in the past would have been Communists, but they are very weak - there is no chance for a Communist to win office in any major country; even China's Communists are authoritarian capitalists who have retained the old brand name.
Dehumanization is equally present on the left. The left is currently redefining the word Nazi to be equivalent to conservative in order to gain moral high ground. It's a big problem on both sides of the aisle and if you don't see it, you're drinking Kool aid.
> The left is currently redefining the word Nazi to be equivalent to conservative in order to gain moral high ground.
The scenarios I've seen people called Nazis, it was a matter of calling a spade a spade. What would you call a "conservative" who has swastika tattoos, a propensity to shout "hail victory" and re-enacting Nazi torch ceremonies? If you consider these folk the standard-bearers for conservatives, I think this says more of you than the people calling Nazis by their name.
You are being disingenuous if you are suggesting that the Nazi label is being applied to anything more than the (seeming ascendant) far right fringe.
Those aren't the only people being labeled. Plain Trump supporters get called that. Black people ho support Trump or Latinos supporting trump's immigration policies are getting lumped into the same group. It's really unfortunate because it's as if anyone who doesn't agree with their world view is a nazi.
It's unfortunate because people in the middle, who will now get skewered for being fence sitters will be more likely to vote against the antifa types who are trying really hard to antagonize.
You're going to have to narrow it down - Olbermann's Twitter feed is full of videos I'm not going to wade through. A search doesn't find any evidence of calling "Plain Trump supporters" Nazis - I mean, he's definitely calling people who support and excuse Nazis Nazis but I think that's a reasonable stance, no?
I'm not a conservative. No need for personal attacks, even if I was. Nobody considers some random Joe six pack to be the standard bearer for conservatism...except people that are trying to draw that comparison for obvious subversive reasons.
it's always a problem no matter who does it; I abhor it from the left too. But consider that it's unlikely to be 'equal' at any point in time between different groups in a fast-changing political landscape.
My main point is that the difference between the groups is not ordinary people on Twitter, but high-profile leaders, even national leaders, are doing it on the right; Obama did not act like Trump in that regard; the UK foreign minister and the leader of Hungary, among others, openly advocate white supremacy. Also in the media: Read Wall St Journal editorials, which go out of their way to demonize (and dehumanize) those on the left; it's in almost every one, it seems.
The current president refused to speak against swastika-waving literal Nazis. The left certainly has problems, but it's not accurate to say they're just as bad.
>even China's Communists are authoritarian capitalists who have retained the old brand name.
That one is a little more nuanced than you present. They are communists except for some big areas of the economic system. However, there are many areas where they have not departed. How the party is run, how the country is organized and governed, how the people are controlled, 5-year plans, etc.
> Win power? I hope not. Who would want any of those two choices
I agree. I'm against both. My point is that there is no threat of that from the left right now, but perhaps the largest threat from the right since WWII. Antifa has no chance of gaining political power anywhere much less having advocates in the White House and other national capitals.
> >even China's Communists are authoritarian capitalists who have retained the old brand name.
> That one is a little more nuanced than you present. They are communists except for some big areas of the economic system. However, there are many areas where they have not departed. How the party is run, how the country is organized and governed, how the people are controlled, 5-year plans, etc.
I don't know if I agree. They remain authoritarians (maybe becoming totalitarians) in those regards; they use the same structures that were used by Communists when they were ascendant in China and worldwide; but I'm not sure what is particularly Communist about all of that in the political ideological sense. I do know that Xi was reviving some of the ideological language, but that seemed more like a tool of obedience than something anyone took seriously. Capitalist authoritarians took over the Communist machine and decided it was easier to use the legacy tech. But maybe you know something I don't ...
Do you have any evidence linking those accounts to Antifa? Or any indication that they're Antifa? I might be missing it but I can't see anything in that image which justifies you linking it to Antifa...
A fair point; I should have written that more carefully. But if Amy says, "Bob is a hypocrite and you can't trust anything he says", and Bob responds, "Amy is demonizing me" - Amy and Bob are not equally guilty of demonization.
Perhaps I should have written: There's a serious problem that large numbers of conservative leaders and elite engage in demonization and dehumanization of others, to the point where it has become normalized, acceptable political discourse for them.
In hindsight, it worked out OK for most people. Most of the time it does. The problem is that sometimes it turns out really really bad. I'm from Florida and I worked in construction during college. I was down in South Florida after Andrew. Ground zero was like a warzone. No street signs, traffic lights, etc. Almost every single house was missing a roof. There was no place to buy fuel, food, and water. I saw a lot of human misery. Especially among the poorer population. It was like this for months because of the scale of devastation. We still feel the effects of Andrew in FL. We probably have the most stringent building codes in the country and the highest insurance rates.
Major catastrophes like Andrew and Katrina are black swans. Nobody predicts the level of devastation ahead of time. It's usually hindisght, like "it was so obvious!". Therefore, I think it's ignorant to not at least advise people to evacuate at some point. Maybe not 2 hours before the storm hits. Days maybe? They always do advise evacuation of coastal regions here in FL. I always listen too.
Katrina was not a poor prediction of the storm, it was the levee that broke combined with a depressed geometry that made it so disastrous.
And we could not have advised people to evacuate days ahead. Thursday morning, it was just a tropical storm. Suddenly, around lunchtime, it was a category 3 and my business launched business continuity planning procedures. By the end of the day, it was a cat 4. It made landfall the next day. Evacuation would have only put those people outdoors when the storm hit.
You have made my point twice. Nobody predicted the levee was going to break. Nobody predicted Harvey would be a Cat 4 by the time it made landfall. There is no way to know which storm is going to be the "big one" until the aftermath. Therefore, we shouldn't assume there is no need to evacuate.
Nobody assumed there was no need to evacuate - the problem is that evacuations make things worse unless you have time. And declaring an evacuation over every tropical storm would just desensitize people.
To expand on that point slightly: Houston uses interstates as extra storm water collection areas. That is, the interstates are at lower elevation than the surrounding area, so the water collects there rather than (or at least before) flooding other areas. If you have an evacuation ordered, where the people don't have enough time to get out, you have huge numbers of people in cars sitting on those interstates as the water starts rising. That is not a healthy scenario.
Of course, you now get the opposite problem. My brother-in-law's neighborhood now has a mandatory evacuation. But now nobody can get out, because the roads are already covered...
Coastal areas of Texas are advised (and/or required) to evacuate in advance of a major hurricane hit. Galveston was uninhabitable after Ike and Bolivar Peninsula was literally completely destroyed. Those areas were evacuated, and Houston was begged to stay put so that they could be. And that was the right thing to do.
But Harvey was not a direct hurricane hit, and Houston is not coastal. Houston is what it is because it's far enough inland to be reasonably hurricane resistant. And Harvey landed 200 miles away and nobody knew what it would do afterwards, just that it would do it slowly. That's not a situation where you order evacuations. Frankly there's very few situations where Houston can and should be evacuated.
The local (and regional!) response has in my opinion been excellent. Loss of life has been very low. It's not over yet, but I've seen single-day flooding events that have been deadlier. Economic damage will be extremely high, but there's really not much to be done about that.
Agreed. I was stuck as a tourist evacuating out of the South Carolina lowcountry, which has dramatically fewer people during the general evacuation for Matthew.
It was a a nightmare experience that should always be avoided.
I was stuck in traffic for 11 hours driving home to Chicago from the solar eclipse in Carbondale, IL. And I only made it half way home and had to stay overnight. That was the eclipse, not a massive natural disaster. I can't even imagine the secondary disaster a mass exodus might have been, with a million cars running out of gas.
You are spot on. My parents live in Houston and during a past hurricane they were told to evacuate. They made it 2 miles from their house in 6 hours. When Houston floods, there are often not many obvious routes to take with passable roads. They eventually turned around and went home where they would be safer than stranded on a freeway.
I was in Tropical Storm Allison in Houston. Within a few hours that I was at a concert, we went from light rain to the nearby freeway exit being 20 feet under water. We spent the night in a medical office building because we could find any passable route out of a 2 mile radius. My car was swept away into a drainage ditch and filled with water.
People are better off staying home or moving to a nearby high-ground area. Than riding out a hurricane in a car in traffic.
Was stuck in the same horrible jam, too, finally bailed out and spent the night at a rest area, never saw one so full. Some part of the traffic was caused by poor planning on Illinois' part, having massive construction on 57 at the most inappropriate time.
They will oftentimes have a plan for evacuation that has been modeled ahead of time. Of course, they may not follow this plan.
They should shut down inbound highways and use both sides for routing traffic out of the affected area. They should keep the breakdown lanes free of all obstructions to allow shuttles to have bi-directional traffic. Don't tow, or repair, personal vehicles that break down, shove them off the paved surface and put the people on the shuttles. Etc...
Outbound traffic, properly routed, can be done quite rapidly. It takes cooperation and isn't very polite. It's also going to be a political disaster if the emergency turns out to have not been as bad as expected.
They are fairly well marked throughout the Gulf. They are best marked in Florida, as I recall. I believe they are blue signs to mark the evacuation routes.
Err... I modeled traffic, up to and including disaster plans.
you don't even need to imagine it; hurricane rita had over 100 evacuation-related fatalities, and i'm sure contributed a lot to the decision that evacuation was a bad idea this time.
In Florida it is standard procedure to order evacuation of ANY city facing direct impact by hurricane. Florida, unlike Texas, is a heavily populated peninsula with only two or three major interstates leading out of the state. Do not tell me Houston is incapable of evacuation. It's no bigger than Miami and Houston residents have many more directions to disperse than Floridians.
Houston was not facing direct impact from the hurricane. It was not directly impacted. The hurricane passed south west of Houston. It's not the wind or storm surge that are the problem in Houston. It's the rain.
Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours.
That train could evacuate 15K people a day.
Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets).
Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.
This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In Japan those trains could easily make 100-200 round trips a day. And there would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.
Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities?
Three times a day? That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.
The demand is not there. Most people who live in Austin don't commute to Houston for work, and vice versa. I'd venture a guess to say that even regular business travel for workers out of Austin and Houston is not to their neighbor city, but to the coasts (which are thousands of miles distant, making even high speed rails impractical in most cases, compared to aircraft).
If the demand isn't there, why spend untold billions filling it?
It's not only that, it's also the fact that public transportation is bad in most cities in the U.S. You need to have a way to get to the train in city A, and a way to travel after departing the train in city B.
That's assuming you only have 1 train.
Trains leave between Osaka and Tokyo every few minutes at rush hours, and travel at speeds upto 300 km/h. They are timed to nearly 1 second accuracy, monitored precisely by computers, and each station has multiple tracks to buffer the traffic.
Tokyo's station serves 3000 trains daily and some 415K passengers per day as of 2013.
The Chinese high-speed rail system also deals with similar levels of passenger traffic. Shanghai's Hongqiao station for instance has no less than 30 tracks, can hold 10K passengers at the same time, and comfortably serves an average of 210K passengers per day (much more on holidays), and it is only one of a few railway stations serving the area.
Trains scale well if you do them right. Technology has come a long way.
The assumption was that you have 800 train cars and that you would load roughly 33 cars every 10 minutes.
But let's take your numbers: 415K passengers per day. Let's keep the same three day evacuation period. That's ~1.2 million people. Leaving 5 million in Houston.
Here's the point: Evacuating millions of people over a weekend is a gargantuan task. Magic words like "train", "plane", or "automobile" don't instantly solve the problem.
Tokyo's population is about 4 times that of Houston. So fine, instead of running 3000 trains a day from the central station, you can run at least 750?
That's what life would look like if people in the US actually used trains on a regular basis.
In any case, all I'm saying is that if a massive number of people need to be moved, trains can scale well, additional reserve capacity can be deployed during evacuations, and it's also a lot safer than having hundreds of thousands of people taking to the roads in bad weather.
Googling Houston metropolitan population gives 6.5 million. For Tokyo you get over 37 million. So Tokyo is 5.7 times Houston. Having been both places, Houston is much smaller. Houston also can't build subways, they'd always be flooding.
If you include the entire metropolitan area, then there are many, many more train stations to factor in than just the central stations. But in any case, order-of-magnitude wise you get the idea. Houston isn't that small and many cities around the world with even 1 million people have excellent public transportation.
One word: cars.
No other explanation needed.
Car culture and car manufacturers' interests play a big part in the current inadequacy (by western standards) of the US infrastructure.
The city I live in is in suburban sprawl mode right now. The main reason is apartments in city cost a fortune if you want reasonable amount of space. For family or hobbies or whatever. 1 bedroom apartment close to city centre == 2 bedroom apartment within city limits == 3-4 bedroom house with proper backyard and garage and everything just outside city limits.
this. A lot of Berlin's public transport infrastructure (a city that definitively sprawls in the suburb, compared to other EU capitals) was built in the late 1800/early 1900.
Check density stats for Berlin.
If "population density" was really the dominant reason, then New Jersey would have a public transportation system far better than most countries in Europe.
But at this time they know the specifically affected areas where people face the danger of rising waters --but mayor still had not called for evacuation. Not a general evacuation, but evacs from the most affected areas in imminent danger. Even NPR is questioning the present stance[1]
The headline has a question mark at the end; that's the extent of the "questioning". The rest of it lists every point made to support the decision to stay. It even notes at the end that both FEMA[1] and the state government not only refused to question the mayor's decision but backed it.
It's not a critical story, and it's disingenuous to suggest that simply because "even NPR" ran an explainer story, that there's some widespread official or credible base of observers "questioning the present stance".
[1] Literally:
> The head of FEMA, Brock Long, "did not question the decision," Reuters reports.
>But at some point, of course, those floodwaters do become deadly. If lower floors flood completely, Houston's Office of Emergency Management cautioned, residents should never take refuge in the attic unless they have a way out. They could risk being fatally trapped.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Do you disagree with that advice, or do you think it means that a large-scale evacuation is called for? Did you skip:
> Attempting to drive through flooded streets is a common cause of death during heavy rainstorms.
Basically, you are damned if you stay and damned if you drive. Maybe building a float from furniture would work, but I think the Office of Emergency Management knows better than random internet commenters how to handle a flood.
NPr followed up Lieutenant General Honore (of Katrina and Rita experience) and he disagreed with the decision of Houston mayor.[1] And now they are evacuating areas because of impending breaches.
A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.
I was living in Houston at the time and I was in one of those cars stuck in the freeway. It took us roughly 40 hours to reach Dallas.
It is also important to mention that we were fleeing Hurricane Rita (category 5 at some point), only a month after Hurricane Katrina. Memories of the damages caused by Hurricane Katrina played a major role in our decision to evacuate.
NPR touches on this[1], while they agree that putting people on gridlocked highways is counterproductive, they do wonder why the mayor had yet to call for an evacuation when it was now clear where people should evacuate from. Being that they now know the areas in danger and the areas not.
They do "wonder why" but then they list the various explanations and tradeoffs that have been made given the nature of the storm and the risks of the evacuation itself. The questioning is a rhetorical and slightly click-baity device, not actual disagreement, as far as I could tell.
That is good information and a good point of view to have, but it doesn't change your earlier misstatement about NPR, itself, "wondering why", which is the thing I was trying to add context to. (maybe you didn't mean it that way, I'm cranky ;))
There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. If you made it that far, you are probably already out of danger. As for buses, how do you coordinate bus plans for 6.5 million people across a 50 mile by 50 mile area? And then, assuming you could get even a million people onto buses, where do you take them that can handle even a hundred thousand refugees on 24-48 hours notice?
For most of the US, and especially a city built like Houston, there are no good options.
Edit: I underestimated the size of the Houston Metro Area. It's closer to 100 miles by 100 miles.
You don't need a station, you just need a track. You can load at any point where there's a track with a flat area beside it.
The tricks are getting people to that loading point (without their cars, because you don't have enough parking for what you're trying to do), and getting the trains from that point to out of town without having to cross a flooded area.
Houston has plenty of tracks. I presume it has flat areas next to tracks. Getting out of town without having to cross flooding? I don't know. Enough tracks to hold the traffic that would be needed? Probably not.
1) Houston is one of the biggest metros areas in America at ~6 million. Even cities with strong public transportation wouldn't have the resources to bus and train 6 million people
2) There aren't many train lines, passenger trains, and most of the lines are inaccessible to most of the city.
3) There are not many buses in the city as the city is hugely sprawled out so public transportation is weak.
However, even if Rita happened to a city like say Boston, with strong public transportation options, the disaster would be pretty similar. The traffic infrastructure just isn't there to transport 6 million+ people no matter what vehicle.
Why is that an okay situation to be in? Given things floods, dirty bombs, etc. have a non-zero chance of happening, shouldn't cities, states and countries have the infrastructure to perform mass-evacuations if necessary?
You have to weigh the death toll of the evacuation against the death toll of the disaster.
We see the flooding issue right now--an evacuation would have killed far more people.
A dirty bomb? Once the bomb goes off you will have plenty of time to evacuate where you need to. Keeping radioactivity contained would be more problematic than removing people.
A biological agent? You want to quarantine rather than evacuate.
A fire? San Diego showed how to deal with that--phased evacuations ahead of the actual fire path.
Earthquake? Well, once it's done you have plenty of time to evacuate.
I can't really think of anything that would affect something the size of Houston simultaneously.
Enormous compared to what? We spend 3.2 trillion a year on Medicare, which is 9.9K a person [1]. Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible. Imagine how great normal day to day travel would be once that is in place, city by city.
No, we don't. As your own source says, it is only $646 billion on Medicare, and $3.2 trillion a year in total combined public and private healthcare expenditures.
> Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible.
Then it still probably wouldn't be enough, and we'd get a lot more value for nearly doubling infrastructure spending [0] if we spent it on something else.
> 1) Houston is one of the biggest metros areas in America at ~6 million. Even cities with strong public transportation wouldn't have the resources to bus and train 6 million people
I'd disagree here. Many major cities in the world could probably get this done. I guess you could get London evacuated within a day just by trains if you plan accordingly. And that'll be the case for most European cities as well as many in Asia. It's just US cities which have little to no public transport (except for NYC).
Evacuating the Randstaad is feasible within a few days, at least in theory. Most people live walking distance from a tram, bus or train station.
Even equating civility, which is not the case, between the NL and TX, there's literally no public transport available, period. Roads are not an option (just check any daily commute between say Montrouse and Katy).
Houston is a dead trap in events like this, with no recourse available other than holing up and hoping it's not your time.
Evacuation or not, I'm sure to leave the city at the slightest sign of heavy rain, and I haven't regretted so far.
Source: I lived in both places for the last ten years.
6 million people / 60 people per bus = 100K buses.
If each bus made 10 trips, that's still 10K buses.
If you assigned each bus to one of 100 evacuation depots around the city, that's 100 buses per depot.
It would take a remarkable team to manage a depot like that, and you would need 100 such teams. Plus 30K drivers. Plus refueling logistics. Plus pit crews.
"Just put them on buses" is easy to write and enormously hard to pull off.
How many school busses do you have in 500mi radius? Would guess it's probably around that area. They have drivers and could be in the area in <10hrs after the plan is activated.
I definitely see that an emergency evacuation for ~6.5 million people would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita. I feel uncomfortable just scaling up for the rescue mission while people hang around. It seems way too reactive. I don't know if there's a more progressive evacuation model that works. I assume it's been tried and has possibly failed.
Evacuation doesn't have to mean all 6.5 million have to leave, just those in low lying areas. It also doesn't have to mean leaving the city, It looks like the downtown area has plenty of tall buildings that would make for some high density evacuation areas and have rooftop helicopter access for emergencies and food/water drops.
The problem with any evacuation plan that requires more than 48 hours of notice is two-fold:
1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead.
2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention.
An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens.
And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere.
And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita.
My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit.
During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again.
If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched.
Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again.
I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them.
They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying.
A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better.
But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
These are terrible events but you should recognize that statistical odds don't always match up with your individual outcome. Case in point are seat belts. On average they save lives but occasionally to hear of someone getting stuck in a vehicle in such a way that cost them their life. Doesn't change the fact that you should always wear a seat belt...
I feel like you ignored the part about the heavy guaranteed cost of evacuation, even when nobody is physically hurt. Imagine if your seat belt caused heavy bruising every use. You wouldn't keep using it.
> would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita
Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts or of flood-resistant design. Anything from a rudimentary elevated home to a fully adjustable Narita-style hydraulic lift system...
It's very common in parts of coastal Florida. The homes are designed not to look like it, but the first floor is just storage and the actual living areas are on the second floor (on up). In reality the homes are on stilts, and people just use the underside like a basement or garage.
Probably more like a Queenslander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) ) house on stilts or something similar. It also helps with cooling which I imagine would be beneficial on the Texas coast. It's remarkably low tech and effective, you can often find 100 year old ones only a meter or two above rivers that regularly flood.
Don't live in a flood plane, leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.
Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
>leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.
This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the you leaving, while most of the population stays.
>Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address: human life. Unless your plan is for flood insurance to drive down the population in the region; which might work long term, but we still need to figure out how to handle the situation until then.
>If the bad half of global warming predictions happen.
This is the bad half of global warming predictions. The only question left is how bad the even worse half will be.'\
>If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
Why wouldn't people have motivation to fix it? Aid is not going to be enough to compensate for all the damages (not event counting indirect economic damage). Everyone, from individuals, to municipalities, to the state, to the federal government, will come out of this in the red.
>Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address
It does if legally required - the point isn't to finance the evacuation, it's to make living in a flood plain financially unattractive. It's the "let the market decide" approach to disaster planning, by pricing in the cost of disaster instead of externalizing it to FEMA and the Red Cross.
It's not priced in. People are more likely to just hope it doesn't happen to them. If you force both insurance and evacuations then the risks are actually priced in, with deaths minimized and a constant cost of living bump instead of tons of people gambling their lives and livelihood.
>>leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.
>This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the you leaving, while most of the population stays.
There's also the issue of having the means to be able to evacuate. Time off work (without pay for a large part of the population), alternative housing, food, travel expenses, for what may or may not end up being a big storm can be out of reach for many people.
> This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the you leaving, while most of the population stays.
You don't see how having millions of people evacuate over a period of 48 hours vs 6 makes the problem less severe?
legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
No one will be able to afford it, so it will end up being subsidized by the Govt. Like requiring a 70 year old with cancer to get life insurance after years of treatments.
I read that many residents were given subsidized or free flood coverage following Rita. That lasted 3 years and expired almost a decade ago. Few, if any of those policies are still being paid. Still leaves the question of whether we pay for this damage or leave people with nothing. Likely something in between the extremes.
This is pretty simple to solve, actually. Once a property is destroyed, pay out the claim as normal, but stop subsidizing insurance on that property. The people who couldn't afford market rate insurance still get paid for the house they lost, but they have to find a safer place to rebuild.
That’s why you legally require it. Then people who can’t afford it can’t live there and move somewhere else.
The expected cost also potentially brings down the price of realestate so people can afford insurance by paying less morgage.
Really it comes down to acceptable societal risk. If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? What if it’s every 20 years? Once in 5 years?
At some point we can all agree that maybe it shouldn’t be treated as unexpected and precautions should be required. Just like we require everyone to have car insurance.
I mean as in using taxes to pay for recovery instead of property insurance. It’s an important feature of society that we do that for rare catastrophic events. But I think there should be a line that’s somehow tied to the probability of said event happening.
That’s why I escalated in my original post. Did you read it?
We pay for 1 in 100 years. Sure.
What about 1 in 20? Maybe
1 in 10? Uhhh
1 in 5?
Let's look at some stats. The east coast gets devastated by some hurricane or another about every 5 years right? Like absolutely trashed. Other years it gets milder hurricanes.
At what point do we require hurricane insurance of everyone near the Atlantic Ocean? Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax. We KNOW it’s going to hit some part of the coast super hard every small number of years. Why are we so surprised every time?
I mean, look at this wikipedia page on hurricanes in the US[1]. For the past 160 years we've had between 10 and 25 hurricanes hit land every decade. That's an average of 1 to 2.5 hurricanes PER YEAR.
Why are we so surprised every time?
Something that happens every year is not a rare event.
I'm not an actuary, so I'll have to defer my quantitative analysis, but:
Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax
We already have this. Federal income taxes are what's used to fund FEMA, which admittedly only handles one aspect of a complex disaster, but if I take your point correctly it would provide a narrowing of the issues.
100 years is frequent enough that -- if there's no variance in how long passes between occurrences -- it will pretty much always have happened within living memory and society will have an established way of handling it.
But an event that happens once in 4-5 generations is still rare.
The problem is that the risk of a once in 100 year storm happening along hundreds of miles of coast is much higher than the risk of a given place having a once in 100 year storm.
One thing I would prioritize at a policy level is making sure that developers are not able to run in front of flood controls and profit by building in unprotected areas without paying for much of the flood control.
The problem is there is a federal insurance program and it keeps paying out to the same people repeatedly - I put this in another comment but it's 30% repeat payouts.
I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor.
had this been India, the opponent of the Mayor would have politicized the situation and asked for resignation of the mayor and claimed that it was a mistake to not evacuate.
Yeah I dunno if I like the false choice between "evacuate incompetently" and "don't evacuate at all." Could there maybe be a third option of evacuating only the relevant areas (low-lying ones near the bayous), safely and efficiently, via a well-thought-out plan?
If I read the article correctly, most of the flooding is due to heavy rains, not storm surge. Even in Singapore, predicting which areas will be flooded due to heavy rains isn't easy, judging from the number of local reports of floods after heavy rains. This will make it difficult to judge which areas to evacuate.
This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."
Yeah but, hydrologists have a joke: What's the first law of hydrology? Water runs downhill. Which is funny when you're a PhD accustomed to wrangling ridiculously complex multidimensional partial differential equations from fluid dynamics, to say the same thing.
But I suppose what ruins any ability to rely on "the first law of hydrology" here is the fact that the whole area is so flat, and so low, and so paved.
I'm still, as a Floridian, having a hard time understanding why evacuation is not an option. We have evacuated large cities in Florida many times over the past decades. We have no trains either and more distance to travel to get to total safety than Texans. This comes down to preparation and Houston & Texas dropped the ball.
There must be a lot of 'preppers' in Houston. Maybe it's too early, but does anyone know of any honest 'post mortems' of strategies that people choose beforehand and how it worked out?
The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety.
Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way.
None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.
Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.
Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?
Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside?
Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.
It's not either/or, it's both/and: climate change and city planning are orthogonal to one another.
> Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?
That's highly odd way to phrase the question.
Climate change is responsible for more energy in the oceans, which is responsible for more, bigger, storms. Bigger storms mean more damage per storm. Climate and weather are different. The climate changing in a manner that makes the weather more extreme will always contribute to damage, but will never be "responsible" for it as it will always be the weather causing the damage...
So: this is the third "once in 500 years" event in 3 years. That is what "climate change" looks like. These storms "suddenly" popping up? Climate change means more of that, as we have been seeing and can demonstrate statistically. The long term prognosis? Thanks to climate change it's worse, with these rare events becoming ever more frequent, and the extent of damages growing over time.
Our climate is provably changing, from human activity. This is very clear. Barring holodecks there are no primary causes for weather than climate... Change that climate away from what our society is adapted for and expect pain.
What other "once in 500 years" event occurred? Having a hard time coming up with a storm this disastrous since Katrina, which was a mere Cat 3 hurricane that happened to break a bunch of levies protecting a sub sea level city. That was an engineering failure. Nothing extraordinary about Katrina as a hurricane. Hurricanes are naturally occurring disasters that have pummeled coast lines for billions of years. Climate change is surely occurring but it hasn't had a dramatic effect on hurricanes as of yet. We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.
> Tomball, Texas, Public Works director David Esquivel told a local paper there this year that the Houston area had “two 500-year storms back to back”: over Memorial Day weekend of 2015 and early April 2016. That means that Hurricane Harvey constitutes the third “500-year” flood in three years.
Rare meteorological events do not correlate to large scale disasters, per se. They only reflect the probability of the underlying event happening in any given year. Imagine that your nearest creek "flooding" by 2 inches should only happen every thousand years, for example.
> We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.
Aaaaand here's the fundamental confusion with those kinds of summaries: what is the difference between speed and acceleration?
We have always had bad weather. Having more bad weather than before, more frequently, is the issue. Climate change did not invent the hurricane. Climate change ensures our hurricanes will be bigger, more frequent, and more likely to combine with other larger, more frequent, weather systems. See Sandy, for example.
The past decade has been pretty lull as far as hurricanes go in the Atlantic and Caribbean. We haven't seen closer to the activity that they saw in the 50s and 60s in my lifetime.
The "number of hurricanes" is irrelevant. Arguably it is misleading: many small hurricanes is much more human friendly than a few monster hurricanes. Climate predictions are solid on more intense hurricanes that last longer, have more rainfall in the short term, and additionally increase with (mild) frequency in the decades to come.
At the same time, hurricanes are a specific weather incident with no reflection on the broader climate (monsoons, tropical storms, cyclones, Pacific/atlantic differences, el ninos, etc etc).
At the same same time changing the goalposts of the conversation from number of "once in 500 years" to "how many hurricanes" is in-congruent. As I pointed out: rare events do not directly correlate to extreme events.
TBH: climate trolls and sceptics on the net really need to up their game. This stuff was played out in the 90s. Any information anyone is honestly missing on this topic is readily available in google, so at this point one has to assume that ignorance is willful.
The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal.
It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.