A scheme should be mentioned as to *how* a major city, with several days warning, should be evacuated. It is not hard at all to imagine.
Start with a city wide canvass with city employees and the help of support organizations and volunteers, going door to door to locate elderly, disabled, and other persons not easily able to evacuate. At the same time order hospitals, hospices and nursing homes to create rosters of all patients and caregivers.
Mobilize bus and other public transport, as well as tow truck companies, the latter being stationed at intervals on evacuation routes, and authorized to tow disabled vehicles off the road.
People with vehicles with be evacuated in waves, based on their license plate numbers, over the course of several days. Police vehicles with instant license plate scanners will direct vehicles without that days numbers onto secondary evacuation routes.
Set up a phone bank able to systematically call every phone number in the city, with recorded messages of important information, with the ability to also request additional assistance of several kinds.
Set up “checkpoints” far outside the disaster area, for people to make inquiries, report missing individuals, coordinate with support agencies, and other vital services. These should also be communications nodes.
Of course, there are a lot of other things to do, but this would be a great start to an orderly process.
When they start your genius plan, days before the hurricane hits shore, spend millions of dollars and disrupt even more lives... and then the hurricane goes someplace else.
You think anyone trusts them next time?
There was no real warning of this storm.
You clearly have no idea how massive the Houston Metro area is. We are physically larger than Connecticut and have nearly 7 million people. And that’s not counting Galveston or the coast which would have to be evacuated first and flow through us.
This is not like evacuating, say, Des Moines.