Evacuation: A family's journey into horror, Disabled girl dies as traffic

[Rose Siding]

snip>
Wayne Mathis, 46, of Rosharon, was among those who saw a loved one die in the mad scramble to get out of town. Yesenia Mathis, 17, a severely disabled child he and his family care for, stopped breathing and died as the family was trapped in a nightmare traffic jam on the North Freeway near Louetta.
....
Another disabled child riding in the family's van, Lonnie Mathis, 11, had a body temperature of 108 degrees when doctors first examined him. He survived and is recovering at Memorial Hermann Hospital.
....
The family left their Rosharon home for Dallas about 6 p.m. Wednesday in two vans. By 11:30 a.m. the next day — more than 17 hours later — they had only made it to Spring because of the glacial pace of traffic clogging Houston's freeways as hundreds of thousands of people tried to flee town.

Mathis said he would have gotten off the North Freeway because of the terrible conditions, but all exit ramps appeared to be blocked by police. "The last few hours, we probably didn't move more than a half-mile," he said.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3369440

[neuvocat]

1. Now I don't know which is worse:

the hurricane or the evacuation.

[henslee]

2. Dont mean to come down hard on the guy but if your kid is sick,

you approach the cop at the ramp and get some medical attention.

[Rose Siding]

4. I don't think they realized it was this bad- she was non-verbal

He was doing what the govt asked him to do. It was hot, but how can you tell just when that becomes deadly?

Maybe he messed up, but the information given doesn't indicate it.

[henslee]

5. Heartbreaking.

[sando]

11. Do you actually think he would have gotten help?

The lessons of Katrina and Rita should have taught us all who are middle class or poor that we are not among those who matter in the US any longer. They days of a leadership both in the private and government sector have shown at least to me beyond a reasonable doubt that we are on our own without any kind of assistance even in the most dire circumstances.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. Trains... trains at the ready. They don't do traffic jams. nt.

[theboz]

6. Trains are worse

You can't evacuate millions of people by train. It would simply take weeks, at the very least, running non-stop.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. No, Tokyo could evacuate its central city in three days

using its regularly scheduled trains. If you have bullet trains leaving every twelve minutes and commuter trains that can run as often as every three minutes, both of which have double tracks for going in opposite directions, you can send each train out, send it back empty at top speed, and be ready to load the next few hundred passengers (from any one of the four major outbound stations).

I did the calculations a few days ago, and people on a transit oriented mailing list who are REAL transit geeks told me that I had actually underestimated the number that could be evacuated by train.

[theboz]

12. You're making a few assumptions

1) Bullet trains. As far as I know, there are no bullet trains between Houston and anywhere else. This would require setting up the required infrastructure as well as the costs involved with actually buying the trains.
2) Distance. I don't know where people in Tokyo would evacuate to, but I seriously doubt they would go as far as people from Houston would go. For it to be at all useful, the bullet trains would have to go from major city to major city. Houston to Dallas, Houston to Austin, Houston to San Antonio, etc. would all be needed. In any case, it would take a longer amount of time to travel from Houston to Dallas than from Tokyo to wherever the people there evacuate to.
3) Getting people to the rail stations. Since Houston already has a traffic nightmare and a mass transit system that is a joke, I doubt you could have everyone there in time. We saw that it took hours and hours just to go from downtown to Beltway 8 via car. If the train stations were that far as well, it would take forever just to get people to the stations.
4) City density. I know Tokyo has something like two to four times as many people as the Houston metro does, but in Houston we are all spread out more. Especially when you include Galveston all the way up to The Woodlands as part of the Houston metro, you're talking about a huge amount of space. This makes moving people quite a bit more difficult.

Anyway, I'm not opposed to bringing in bullet trains or any other good means of transportation, but I don't think that it would be as good as you or your rail geek friends think. Not because a hypothetical bullet train couldn't handle it, but because the circumstances would be different. I think we should put the trains in, and I think that it would help some both for evacuation and for everyday use.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. I KNOW that Houston doesn't have bullet trains, and I'm

simply comparing what's possible using a really good rail transit system as opposed to the hundred-mile parking lot that resulted from the attempt to evacuate Houston entirely on rubber tires.

[wellstone dem]

7. And this death

along with the 23 elderly people in the bus, is not counted when they tally Rita's victims.

[muse]

8. I'm just one houstonian and I know several people in hospitals

who are not doing well at all (due to falling into ill health rapidly during the evacuation). This is not an isolated case. For most people, it's not like there were cops near by. The whole evacuation thing was apocalytic. I was out in it for 13 hours. Went 40 miles before turning back for home. Also, trains? We don't exactly have some sort of huge passenger train system in Houston. That's simply not an option here.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. I was hearing that the situation was aggravated by materialistic idiots

who felt that they had to take ALL their family cars (one for Dad, one for Mom, and one or two for the teenagers.)