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

[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.