Houston-area officials defend decision not to evacuate ahead of Harvey: 'Nonsensical thing to do'

[steve2470]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/officials-defend-decision-not-evacuate-harvey-article-1.3448658

Houston-area officials are defending the decision not to issue mandatory evacuations ahead of Harvey, which inundated the region with life-threatening floods.

Water was released from reservoirs overwhelmed by Harvey, in hopes of protecting the city's downtown. But the additional water — on top of another round of pounding rain — could endanger thousands of homes.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, speaking Monday with NBC's "Today," said residents might have "laughed at us or ignored it" if an evacuation order was issued.

"With a rain event over a county of four and a half million people, you don't know exactly where the rains are going to fall, you don't know exactly which neighborhoods are going to flood," Emmett said.

"If we had gone out three days before and said, 'we want four million people to leave Harris County,' that would have been a totally nonsensical thing to do," he added.



It was the correct decision.

[librechik]

1. better not sorry when not safe

hey, we effed up on purpose! it's the Republican way, because NOBODY could predict a disaster coming except liberal eggheads and we never listen to them.

[unblock]

2. nobody could predict flooding following massive rainfall!

[librechik]

4. when you worship anti-intellectualism

you make big dumb mistakes.

[Igel]

32. This was a decision exactly in keeping with the one taken

by the Democratic mayor of Houston.

It was the right decision in both cases. I don't care what the political affiliation of the person involved--if I think it's a dumb move, it may be a dumb move with (D) or (R) after it but I still think it's still a dumb move. Turner was right. Emmet was right. I might be wrong, but I have good reasons to think it's the right decision.

Think of Harvey as the Tax Day or Memorial Day floods on steroids, not a hurricane. Suddenly it's a different kind of problem and calls for a different kind of response. It's not thinking outside the box, it's just saying there are two different boxes.

Consider this:

Most of the people in and around Houston are unaffected in any serious way by Harvey. Best option: Minimize the disruption. Don't evacuate 100% when 10% are affected.

The area affected is huge, not just Houston, and evacuating that would be insane--but just evacuating Houston would be massively unjust. Once you deal with the city, even a huge one like Houston, you're about half-way through the problem. But most of the news focuses on Houston, and that just inside or near the inner loop. That's myopic. The solution has to affect a wide area equally well, it needs to be scalable. Don't evacuate just 40% of those affected, or do it piecemeal.

Those who are unaffected are pitching in to help those who are affected. Take advantage of resources available.

It's better to have flood victims sheltered almost in place than trucked 150 miles away. We need to support personal and community stability and facilitate a return to normalcy. You want those kids to return to their school and be with friends, you want to encourage normalcy after an abnormal situation--this is true for all kids, but esp. true for at risk populations. The Katrina refugees here had a tough time fitting in. Houston "refugees" a mile from home won't.

So with rain-event floods you want a plan that distinguishes between areas that will be affected, might be affected, and won't be affected, that takes into account that the catastrophe rolls out in a way that becomes largely predictable. We see mandatory evacuation orders now that we know who, when, and where. They're not always where we'd have predicted. We have sucky procedures in place for such orders. Truly, truly sucky.

At this point we're talking 5 or so people dead in the Houston area from Harvey. The Rita evacuation, bungled but less than what many said should have happened this time, is said to be responsible for 100 deaths, give or take a dozen (yes, attributions vary). The current evacuation plans are untried, and the evacuation for Harvey would have been much larger. Five dead is a tragedy; 100 dead isn't a statistic.

Turner and Emmet and the rest of the area need good plans. They don't have them. The way the law's written, the responsibility is on local officials--the state and feds help, assist, but don't coerce.

I'm not going to fault either for not having plans, and we can discuss how those plans should like (IMHO) later. We've had a number of "freak" events in the last few years and it's hard to plan for what's not predicted. This is getting to be routine, so maybe this time something'll be done. It's the kind of thing that Obama's now rescinded EO might have compelled, but the rescission just removes the compulsion. Turner and Emmet (etc.) should still do the plans not because DC orders them to at risk of losing federal funding, but because they're local officials and responsible to local residents.

For example: We have the information but nobody's put it together. So I'm watching the news and two neighborhoods are flooding, not far from each other. Thing is, if you look at bayou water level figures and topographic maps you'd probably say these areas were predictably flooded--when Cypress Creek is at X feet these addresses will be affected, when at Y feet *these* addresses will be affected. But nobody made plans for this ahead of time and no there isn't enough staff to look over all the maps and bayou water levels to make the prediction and issue evacuation warnings. (Or write the program that would compare them and produce a map based on flood-stage increments.) But I'm not going to fault them for not being omniscient, I don't recall any great constituent demands for such maps or preparations or, in fact, any such suggestion. But when this is done, they need to work on this kind of plan and not spend the next 6 months engaged in a political firestorm because both teams made the same mistakes--what's said against Emmet is true also against Turner, and any plan needs to include both Harris County and Houston and Fort Bend and Waller and Livingston and Montgomery counties, some deep red, some bright blue, some purple. Consider it utilitarian (not a political party, but more of an approach), and on this all utilitarians can find pretty quick agreement and common ground.

[lostnfound]

8. Last time they tried to evacuate they had 100 people die on jam packed highways

When waters recede I fear we will find out how deadly those highways can be. I suspect you could have had thousands drowning on feeder roads. The highways include underpasses, and when they become impassable, traffic would have been at a standstill while water was rising

[LanternWaste]

34. The largest evacuation in US history was just south of two million people.

The largest evacuation in US history was just south of two million people.

This would have required an evacuation of seven million people in the space of 36 hours. Precisely how was that to be accomplished?

[geek tragedy]

3. Where would 4 million people go? nt

[steve2470]

5. exactly nt

[librechik]

6. Trumpsters think there are FEMA camps waiting for them when the liberals take over

that sounds like a safe emergency shelter.

[B2G]

7. More like 7 million.

And nowhere fast is the correct answer.

[Lee-Lee]

9. Calling bullshit on part of this

"With a rain event over a county of four and a half million people, you don't know exactly where the rains are going to fall, you don't know exactly which neighborhoods are going to flood," Emmett said.

Yeah, we do. There are detailed flood maps for 100% of the US, and major urban areas like Houston all have them integrated with their GIS mapping system to show what the flood risk for every bit of the county or city.

You can see home by home, building by building, if it is in the floodway, 100 year flood plain, 500 year flood plain or if they want to crunch the data they can map for every food of rise past 500 years.

This data is known. It's on hand. When anyone applies for a building permit that is checked to make sure federal regulations for flood plain construction are followed.

Any city or county could, if they wanted, easily map it what neighborhoods and even individual structures are most at risk and set evacuation priorities and mandates based on that.

If they had taken the time before this to set evacuation priorities by residence and every year explained the risk to them and then set priorities they could have gotten the right people to tke it seriously and leave- at least a good percentage of them.

[4139]

12. Yep, there should have been targets zones evacuated, and yes they have map...and

The article mentions they are releasing water from two reservoirs... homes in the spillway path should have evacuated.


army corps of engineers should have began lowering the water levels a weeks ago

[marylandblue]

13. The issue isn't the flood maps

It's where the rain will fall, and that will be very uncertain, so you still have to evacuate large areas. Also, in Hurricane Sandy, small difference in elevation made a huge difference. Some people had their basements flood only, so it was safe to stay, while others had their first flood too, making it unsafe, unless they had a second floor.

And.also, those flood maps are not that accurate. A lot of people who were not in the flood plain were flooded.

[Lee-Lee]

14. You evacuate anywhere with increased risk

And it doesn't matter where the rain falls. Worst case is some people left who didn't need to.

And yes, the maps are pretty accurate, and most err on the side of safety. There is a strong science behind it and water is pretty predictable- it always moves downhill.

That small difference in elevation is exactly what these flood maps track and are based on.

Will it be a perfect tool with 100% success? Of course not, nothing is. But if you were able to use the data to have targeted mandatory evacuations and you got 90% of the affected homes evacuated that means the roads are less clogged because only the right people are leaving and your rescue efforts have a lot less to deal with on the remaining 10%

[uponit7771]

27. +1, at least tell people on the news WHICH lower lying areas to evacuate instead of people guessing

... or doing like Abbot did and just say "low lying areas" cause that doesn't mean shit to people who don't know the geography of the city.

[Lee-Lee]

30. A simple way to do it would be color coded street signs or curbs

Put a different colored strip on the pole for street signs based on elevation and flood risk.

Then they can say "mandatory evacuations for all red, yellow, black stripe areas. Blue and green stripe areas be prepared to go at a moments noticed when the word is given. White and organe stripes stay in place" or something similar.

Simple, easy for anyone to understand.

[uponit7771]

37. +1

[Igel]

39. Would be.

But a lot of at-risk areas aren't at risk. In this kind of non-life-threatening crisis you evacuate who you need to.

Otherwise you keep people local. That depends on knowing where's safe, and you don't know that for sure ahead of time.

Look at Katrina. People were uprooted and many didn't make it back. Kids were trucked to a different city. Some family members lost touch with others. They were warehoused until it was deemed safe to truck them back in to look at the ruins of their houses, sometimes a week after the water subsided. Even those who had ready transportation needed to drive hours to get back, usually for a visit since they had no place to stay.

Here it's working humanely. Yeah, people leave their homes when they're being flooded. It's a shock to be evacuated. But you stay local. Maybe you stay with friends and family. If there's nobody else, here legally or not, black or Latino or Asian or white, you go to a shelter that's staffed mostly by people that live maybe one or two miles away, who may be here legally or not, black or Latino or Asian or white. Either way, when you want to "go home" it's a mile or two away. You can walk it in an hour if you need to.

Most of the shelters are ad hoc, run by NGOs. School districts are pitching in with opening their doors and getting community and student helpers. Next Tuesday schools are expected to resume, and the kids will still be local to where they've attended school, mostly, for the last year. When the floods recede, the adults will be a mile or two away from their flooded dwellings--and in many cases if they're in apartments the 2nd and 3rd floors will be untouched. This provides normalcy, continuity, and minimizes the trauma. Even if the kids go home to a shelter or their aunt's or their "uncle" Joe's, some things keep on keeping on as they did before. It allows for the easy and probably accurate belief that life will return to something like normal. If you're moved to Waco, the more at risk you are in school the more at risk you are for having your life disrupted for good until you re-establish roots in Waco.


If I personally had the choice of heading to Dallas for a week and hoping to get back to check things out intermittently or staying put I'd stay put. The "gut wrenching" video of people walking through knee-deep water isn't so gut wrenching. You get out, you rinse off. But the property damage is the same, and you know you're nearby.

And then a few people who ventured out from flooded communities turn around and instead of relying on strangers from elsewhere to help them they're relying on local firefighters, police, and volunteers to help. "Citizens helping citizens" isn't a bad thing. I'd rather somebody from a block away help me than some National Guard from Waco. That's sort of a point the news is making. They show up and see a brigade of people with boats helping rescue people, "Who's in charge?" And the answer is nobody--it's the "we the people" volunteer government as opposed to "them the employees paid for by taxes" workers. Some of this is looking for the silver lining in a catastrophe. But part of it is also really thinking that in this kind of situation, while a structure would be nice to notify communities who needed to evacuate to evacuate, this is best left until late (when you know who needs evacuation) and left local. The difference is letting people know the day before a community floods to have them find a place to stay or provide them with shelter and waiting until it actually floods. One's certainly better, but having them move out of the city is a mistake.

In the boonies it's likely in many cases they'll move to the next burg. That's about the same. Families stay together, social networks can be restored or nearly so.

[B2G]

16. And homeowners can read these maps as well.

If I'm sitting in a flood prone area with 50 inches of rain bearing down, I'm not waiting for a government official to tell me to leave.

People have choices and if they choose to stay, that's their decision.

[Lee-Lee]

19. Yes- and you should be aware of it for your home

Especially anyone in a flood prone area like Houston.

Heck when I was looking to buy a home that is something I did before I ever decided to look at a home.

I pulled it up on the county GIS website.

I looked at 2 things- flood plain status and who the neighbors were.

There is one home I really loved and it had 5 acres for a great price. Turns out despit it having never flooded it was classified as in the floodway, the most severe classification.

Two major results of that. First was that flood insurance would cost me $350 a month! And that is sure to rise steadily.

Second is that I could never build an addition to the home, and if the home was ever damaged to the point where repairs would cost more than 50% the value of the home, by the counties estimate, I would be forced to level the home and could not rebuild on the same spot. I could rebuild 20 feet further back on the lot where it was 100 year flood plain if I elevated the home 6 feet.

[B2G]

20. I can't believe they wouldn't know.

As you pointed out, flood insurance ain't cheap and you pay it for a reason.

[Lee-Lee]

21. You would be amazed. Plus many people rent

Most renters don't have a clue.

And a lot of people who are just in the 100 or 500 year flood plain don't pay nearly as much for insurance and is often just rolled as part of the mortgage payment since they require it so it's out of sight or of mind.

[B2G]

23. Yep, very good points. nt

[marylandblue]

25. On the difficulty of figuring out where the floodplain is

www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16211392/100-500-year-flood-meaning

[matt819]

35. OK

But the larger question still remains. How do you evacuate a city of 2.3 million or a metropolitan area of more than 4 million. In 36 hours.

Where do they go? Can shelters accommodate the entire population of the metropolitan area?

If you could identify specific locations and direct evacuation from those locations, you know that most of the next 48 hours would be tied up with calls from people asking if they are in the evacuation zone? There'd be greater confusion.

And this is to say nothing about what would happen to those who are not ambulatory - the elderly, children, the infirm. Are there sufficient services or public transportation to accommodate their evacuation?

How would first responders have been able to do their jobs with gridlocked highways. Gridlocked highways that were flooded. You'd have cars, trucks, and people floating along the flooded roads.

I'd like to see computer modeling of what might have happened had the decision been made to evacuation some/all of the area affected in & around Houston, starting, let's say, at 72 hours before the storm hit. Showing roads, gridlock, accommodations, affect on first responders, etc.

[Igel]

36. It's more complicated.

I know people outside of 500-year floodplains that are flooded simply because the local drainage system failed. It's not that there wasn't room for the water to fit into the bayou system, but because man-made structures failed. In one case, the drainage ditch was simply too narrow even though there was white water from it's mouth down to the ditch leading to the bayou. (There'll be hell to pay at the next HOA meeting.) In this case, it's really just a floodplain when rainfall exceeds 5"/hr for two hours, otherwise it's way outside danger. Call this the "North" case.

I've watched, not this time but during a previous flood, water gush out of storm drains in one part of Houston. They were all linked uphill as the city grew north and west, except that drainage pipe system was adequate when community M was built, but when communities N through W were added on it didn't work. In some cases they have large pipes connected to smaller diameter pipes. By the way, when I watched the storm drains upchuck their floodwaters the sun was shining and it wasn't raining where I was. It's like a desert arroyo, you get a flood if it rains upstream. (Houston's working on fixing this, but it'll take years. We're talking thousands of miles of drainage pipe, and if you don't work from down-flow up you're a fool. The area I watched flood is years away from help.) This was north-central Houston.

Cypress Creek's flooding neighborhoods now. Yesterday there was some street flooding, stopped storm drains and just too much water to run off the roads at once. Cypress Creek's cresting later today at record levels. (This hits close to home, I live south of here but think of the area north as my home base.)

Greenspoint is a weird case. It flooded early this morning, Monday. It didn't flood when it got 16" of rain Saturday night, including some times when rainfall exceeded 5"/hr. It flooded when it got 4" in the same amount of time and rainfall never exceeded 1.5"/hr. Now, a large chunk of Greenspoint is in the 100-year floodplain, making this even weirder.

Here's background info to make sense of this. The Greens Bayou watershed (it's mine, so I know it) empties into a river shortly before the river reaches Galveston Bay, so it's long. However, upstream from Greenspoint there's not much watershed, and it's fairly narrow. So think long and skinny. The heavy rains Saturday night occurred in bands that cross-cut it so when it was raining 5"/hr in one place it was drizzling a mile away. The average rainfall for the watershed upstream of Greenspoint was a bit less than 1"/hr, even if it was a lot higher at times in certain places. Sunday night there were two hours of about 1.5"/hr, but the rain band responsible for that was parallel to the watershed's length, so that 1.5" inches hit pretty much every square inch of the watershed. After half an hour it all hit Greenspoint. Downstream there was no flooding because the bayou widens out below Greenspoint.

So let's talk evacuation orders. In the case of Cypress Creek I think you're right, generally. They can look at the flood gauge info and rain patterns and the contour maps and say what's going to flood.

In the case of Greenspoint, no evacuation order could have been announced. It would have been pointless Saturday night, and unexpected Sunday night. It's really chance. If you say "anyplace could have this happen" then you'd evacuate 10 million people, 6+ from around Houston and the other millions from Victoria over to central Louisiana. And the "North" case is just stupidity in central planning.

Doing things residence by residence is difficult. We have revised flood plain maps after Allison, so the newest are perhaps a decade old. Even if we ignore changes since then (subsidence, new structures), a lot of houses are built up. It's a requirement here, that new construction is at least a certain height above flood level. Older houses, naturally, aren't, but many have been raised (esp. in nicer areas). So if you look where I live, it's maybe 3 feet from street to the concrete pad this thing's built on, and about 4" from where dirt ends to where flooding would begin. It's built since the floodplain map was issued, and I have no idea what the relationship between anything here is and the floodplain. Was the street gouged out? The yard built up? Both? Argh.

For hurricanes I like large evacuation orders. For things like this, you really need to know what's happening. Most people here are safe. Some are flooding today that didn't flood Sunday. It's largely predictable, given inputs, but you need those.

Even then, I think residence-by-residence won't work until we know the elevation of each building. It's a theoretical possibility, but it's just not going to happen. Nobody's going to collect the data.

As for merging bayou levels, rainfall levels, and flood-plain contours, that should be done. I've suggested here before, you've suggested it, but I'm not sure anybody's suggested it to the counties. It hasn't been a big issue or much thought of before. But still you need those inputs, not just the floodplain maps.

[Igel]

40. The Fort Bend judge just showed their 58-foot "inundation map" for his county.

Here "county judges" are the chief county administrators, not necessarily ever a court judge. (It's a "court of commissioners," so it's analogical to have a "judge" preside over it.)

Anyway, they apparently run inundation maps for planning purposes at the county level in Fort Bend. So I assume Harris County, Montgomery, and the rest do, too. They don't run them for 1' or 6" increments and they don't overlay subdivisions.

They could. He's posting the 58-foot one for evacuation planning purposes--a lot of the main routes out of the Brazos River area are closed, so they're posting it to say, "Check your route before you set out." It'll be handy for when the river crests, but still doesn't all the local places that would flood. Just if the levee breaks or is overtopped. 59 feet is the prediction and that basically exceeds tolerances for the levee.

They'll probably post them more often in the future. There's something. And they'll reconsider their levee design.

He added that individual residences in a lot of the area can't be evaluated for flooding from the map because so many are elevated as a flood-risk mitigation strategy.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. ...

[Gothmog]

11. Look up Hurricane Rita

Houston tried to evacukste and it was a disaster wiyh people spending 30+ hours on the road ot reach Dallas or Austin

[Johonny]

18. pretty much

If you ever lived in Houston, then you know the flood areas. I lived there 4.5 years and Houston had two bad floods in that time. People that live in Houston know how to handle floods and have lived through these things before.

[uponit7771]

28. No, you evacuate by priority of lowest lying areas and they knew which ones those were and could

... tell people on the news.

They don't let 5 million people out on the streets

The bigger issue is the catostrophic flood warnings didn't come till 4 - 6 in the morning through phones while everyone was sleep

[Cosmocat]

29. People are stupid on steroids

I had this same back and forth with people 10 years ago when it happened.

Houston is on the southern tip of Texas, SO, there is only one way to go, not four.

Houston is the fourth more populace city in the country.

It is literally impossible to get millions of people out of a city in several days under these circumstances.

And, as other noted, we are seeing so much of their highways complete under water, by as much as double digit feet - THANK GOD they didn't pile hundreds of thousands of people on those roads.

[delisen]

15. At this point in time the choices were limited.

Much as people are often critical of Houston, I am impressed by the readiness of people there to help each other. they sure are not passive and are willing to take risks to help others.

How much loss of life, injuries, would happen in a massive evacuation?

How many people would refuse to evacuate anyway. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions?

There were people in NY who refused to leave when Sandy hit because they had had break-ins by looters during previous evacuations.

How much law enforcement do you need to secure a city of four million?

If massive storms are the new norm, it is going to take long-range planning, wide scale planning.

[Blue_true]

17. They made the right call. nt

[Orsino]

24. Will we ever be sure of that?

About all we could say is that if there had been mandatory evacuations, some might have lived who have died...but evacuating could have stranded/killed people, too.

I don't think we get to know the answer.

[Blue_true]

31. Life works that way. That is why competent people must be put into office.

Fate is never KNOWN and second guessing is just that. Officials used information in hand to make a call, I believe they got it right.

[Igel]

38. No.

And while it's not unreasonable to speculate, that's always true. So it's perfectly okay.0

Picture this: Obama won in 2008. He did certain things that McCain wouldn't, and McCain would have done different things.

Now let's say in 2024 there's a war with Russia that drags in China over North Korea (who does something opportunistically stupid) and we can point confidently back to events in 2014 as the point at which things seem to flow towards that war.

But what if we think McCain would have done something differently?

Suddenly we'd have to say that the 2008 election was a mistake. In hindsight. Maybe. But really, I can't imagine a worse waste of time unless you're an academic in search of some article or a writer in search of some story. We're people. We do the best we can. Electing Obama was the best choice given what was known at the time. And at that point, if we have done the best we can we score a 100%. That's what we expect for ourselves. That's the same standard I hold others to. I personally think I'd miss an important moral and ethical point if I did elsehow.

That kind of speculation can be soul-gutting and pointless. We make the choice that we make based on current information and likely predictions. We get it wrong sometimes. Oh, well. Recriminations are pointless. The choice that fits the current information we have and the predictions we have is the right and ethical choice. Think of it as "by definition." We may look back and say that it turned out to be wrong, but the best use of that judgment is to educate us, it's not a moral condemnation. This is a point many miss, who are big into the judgment business based entirely upon their current standards of knowledge and currently accepted principles. If we assume that others judge us morally in some important or defensible way we're forever second guessing ourselves--which can lead to the even more lethal indecision. It's a luxury that armchair quarterbacks can take, but when you're actually calling the shots you do the best you can and let the armchair quarterbacks show their empathy and compassion by looking at reasonable mistakes and saying, "Ah, yes, you had to make a decision and were limited by being human instead of being omniscient and all-wise, so you are praised for doing the very best you could ... No more can be expected." It's vaguely condescending, but only if you take it as such. The future always know more about how the immediate future will turn out than we do, and often knows a bit more about the immediate past. I take it as a point of honor to say, "Yeah, I messed up with this, but I'm going to learn from my mistake." With no further justification needed if the grounds for the cock-up are already known and reasonable.

Are there things to learn from Harvey. Sure. The very statement justifies some mistakes.

Best not to ruminate over reasonable choices reasonably arrived at. We're human. I don't hold Turner or Emmet or anybody else to a higher standard, and I don't make a distinction based on party--everybody's human, people make mistakes (not "mistakes happen"--it's okay to make a reasonable, best option mistake, people).

BTW, this entire "evacuate or not" seems a much bigger issue on DU than it does in Houston, at least for my social network such as it is. Can't speak for the rest of the country. Don't watch the MSM, can't stomach any of them.

[FLPanhandle]

22. It's not hard to see that it was the right call

A population area of over 6 million people.

30,000 are in shelters. That sounds bad but it means that 99.99% of the population were just fine staying put.

Trying to evacuate mass numbers of people would have been infinitely worse.

[Phoenix61]

26. Having driven in rush hour Houston traffic

I can not begin to imagine how to get everybody out of Houston. How do you supply enough gas to keep all those cars moving? My understanding is that was one of the big issues during the Rita evacuation. People running out of gas on the road because they had been idling for so long. Not to mention, people from coastal Texas had to evacuate so the roads were already packed.

[malaise]

33. After Rita

I agree with them

[raven mad]

41. I agree, steve2470. Horrible decision to have to make, but -

the sheer size and population of the area? No way to do it logically or sanely or humanely or safely. NO way.

One of the reasons I live where I do? Not too many people, but enough for community.