Two words for those who're flinging shade at Houston municipal officials: Hurricane Rita [View all]

[TygrBright]

Last edited Sun Aug 27, 2017, 08:04 PM - Edit history (1)

"OMG, did the Houston officials know how bad this was gonna be?"

"Why didn't they evacuate?!?"

"Why haven't they been trying to evacuate since, like, Thursday, even???!?!?"

"Houston ALWAYS floods! They shoulda known! Why didn't they get everybody out?"

ummmm, yeah.

They shoulda told everyone to drive to that Motel 6, twenty-five miles north of town. You know, the one with six million rooms and an unlimited supply of food and water. Right?

For anyone who doesn't remember it, here's a Wikipedia article on Hurricane Rita. Notable takeaway: Of the 120 deaths associated with Rita, more than 100 were directly related to the evacuation. People died in their cars of heatstroke. Heart attacks. A deadly bus fire. They had to use up a lot of valuable resources evacuating people from the evacuation.

There are between six and seven million people in the area affected by catastrophic flooding.

Have you ever been in a traffic jam trying to get home after a concert or sporting event at an arena that holds 30,000 people?

Multiply that by a couple of hundred times, then multiply it again because these aren't concertgoers with purses or backpacks, these are people with families, pets, carloads and trailers full of stuff.

I am old enough to remember when Civil Defense tried to hold evacuation drills- they managed to evacuate just the Portland, OR city center (population of the whole Portland metro area at the time was probably about 350,000) after weeks of preparation and publicity and at enormous cost. Evacuating major metro areas is even more complicated now.

The Houston city government is working with state and federal forces, private relief organizations, military assistance, news media, and help from other major metro areas (NY just sent a few hundred trained disaster responders... how they're gonna get IN, I don't know, but I'm sure they'll do excellent work when they do.)

If you want to blame anyone, blame the climate change deniers in Congress who have steadfastly refused to fund NOAA, NWS, FEMA, and other agencies to model catastrophic weather events and create preparation and response plans and resources on a scale we've never even imagined we would need before.

Oh, and the dickhead who pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord... what's his name again...?

bitterly,
Bright