The last time an evacuation was called for in Houston (Rita), over 100 people died trying to evacuate before the hurricane even hit. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita#Evacuation_deat...)

In terms of life lost, evacuating would have been a disaster. You'd have had gridlocked interstates underwater.

Mayor Turner absolutely made the right call by not evacuating. Living in Houston, I'm probably a bit biased, but I find the criticism he's received for making the decision not to evacuate a bit absurd.

Agreed. I live in Austin now, but I lived in Houston before this (Ike hit about a week after I moved to H-town, what a welcome party). Turner made absolutely the right decision. It was very unclear until very close to landfall how powerful it was going to really be (tropical storm -> Cat 4 in ~50 hours.) That isn't enough time. For ~4 million people, like a week isn't enough time...

If a panic had ensued from an evac order? Honestly, I believe thousands would have died from the roads flooding and being trapped in their cars. It would have been a living nightmare, more than it already was.

(Greg Abbott, on the other hand, did recommend evacuation. I can only assume he did this because his only purpose for existence is to be a gigantic piece of shit, and ruin people's lives in any way he can, but whatever.)

Not in Houston, but have a fair amount of experience in emergency management.

The mayor of Houston picked the best of a number of bad options. Evacuating would have almost certainly resulted in several times the number of casualties. Harvey intensified very quickly, and by the time the threat was clear, it was too late to cut and run. You would have had freeways turned into parking lots, which would then be under 10' of water.

I am not from Houston, but what I read online was that the major highways are designed to serve as overflow drainage for the water. This is part of why in some places they were submerged nearly to the depth of the over-highway road signs. Thus in Houston in particular, they are the most dangerous place to be in a flood. Previous experience suggested it was highly likely people would get stuck on the highways in an evacuation.

How do you evacuate 4 million people in a few days? Wouldn't they all clog up the roads and consume all the gasoline?

At first I thought he didn't make the right decision then history shows that a few weeks after Katrina another storm prompted an evacuation. Many more died then evacuating.

How about just evacuating the most vulnerable?

If you publicize that, tons of other people evacuate, and the interstate system quickly becomes gridlocked. It's counter-intuitive, but every study and disaster plan for Houston has consistently called for shelter-in-place over calls for evacuation from an official source.

Evacuation does not have to mean leaving the city either. Evacuating the most vulnerable to a safe area is more like a peak hour traffic problem.

Some kind of classification system where people and/or households could be grouped together by urgency or sensitivity to calamities (e.g. diabetic, disabled, elderly) would make this process a lot more straightforward. If you're in group X you go at time Y, etc.

Not that this would ever fly in Texas where if the government tells you to do something it's just them interfering in your life.

Cuba has this down to a science. America has no clue what it's doing. The contrast is astounding.

Hn: privacy is the most important thing, the government is making lists and out to get you.

Also Hn: let's make a detailed enough list of the exact medical condition of every household in the country that we can evacuate everyone more than X vulnerable in a few days.

Unrelated: you're aware Cuba has roughly the population of NYC, right?

HN is an odd mix of politics, that's for sure.

Cuba has a fairly large population and very limited resources which makes their system all the more impressive. Their system is worth studying, as if Cuba of all countries can do it, surely the US can: http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-lesson-for-the-us-cubas-respo...

> Cuba’s intersectoral preparedness and response to hurricanes, which include education, drilling and how the country’s relatively small civil defense force is deployed at provincial, municipal and local community levels when a storm is first detected.

The US response seems to be ignoring the experts, blaming the victims, and trying to profit from the resulting mess.

Though of course "can" in a technical sense and "can" in a political sense are worlds apart.

The few historical evacuations of >1mil people have often been over the course of 7+days, as well as over very large areas.

The only _successful_ evacuation of a major metropolitan area (>3mil) in <1month was the khymer rogue. But as they were using brutal violence and took >20k causalities so it is hard to call that successful.

I beg to differ. Exodus of ~1m people in about one day is frequently observed in Europe. It can't be done with cars, of course, because cars are not a means of mass transportation. It can be done easily with trains, though.

Example: Street Parade Zurich, attended by about a million people. Virtually all of those people arrive by train immediately before the event, and are gone the next day. Watching > 100k people pour out of a train station in less than an hour is really a spectacle. Remember that Zurich is not a huge city in the first place.

Example: Paris goes on holiday. All-but-literally everybody leaves Paris for summer holiday, pretty much simultaneously. You don't know what an urban evacuation means until you've witnessed this.

Moving a million people across town is different from getting them out of the path of a hurricane. Hurricanes are bigger than cities.

Those 1 million people in Europe are going to their home.

I bet not even Europe or China can figure out how to suddenly house/feed a million people who had to evacuate from a city for a few days, or even overnight.

Okay this is idiotic.

Evacuation are very different from attending work, or attending a festival. Namely... You plan to return to your home/apartment/etc. and your belongs will still be present. There isn't the threat of death.

Furthermore Evacuations require moving people who often _don't_ have the ability to travel on their own. Rather by choice, or socio-economic pressures i.e.: poverty, or limited parking in city centers. Therefore attendance to work/events for these people is normally just walking a handful of blocks, or using public transit which become limited when dealing with evacuations.