It’s impossible to evacuate Harris County, or Fort Bend County for that matter. The minute you give that evacuate order the roads will be completely gridlocked. Nobody will go anywhere for days. Happened with Katrina. People were literally stranded for days in their vehicles or had to abandon them.
It doesn't seem like this is an option for this storm, with all the rain and flooding.
Houston metro may be 10x the size of New Orleans. And then, “dry” might be 100+ miles away. Exactly where would they go, be housed, be fed, or even go to the bathroom?
There sure are a lot of armchair quarterbacks on things like this...the people working with or for him are logistics experts. That’s what they do for a living, and they’ve probably been doing it for decades.
I guarantee an evacuation of several million people would have caused hundreds of causalities _in and of itself_, even with several days warning and dry weather.
You’re exactly right. It would take 2 weeks to evacuate greater Houston/Harris (and surrounding) counties. And that would take martial law declaration where a coordinated ‘neighborhood-by-neighborhood’ schedule was enforced at the point of a gun by the National Guard. It simply can’t be done in two days by having the mayor go on local TV and tell everyone to just drop everything and hit the road.
I have video from the last time Houston tried to evacuate. We stayed out half the night taking water to the stranded motorists. Looked like a scene from The Walking Dead.