I remember Hurricane Rita. My (legal immigrant) wife couldn’t figure out why I was packing up and plotting routes out of Houston. She said that everything was fine, nobody but me was panicking...because her friends weren’t panicking and the weather was fine.
Then her friends started panicking, and so did she. It was pretty funny...but that is the normal bias. We ended actually staying until the mad rush died down, but still before the storm, as they were opening reverse-flow highway lanes at the end. So we made it out with no problem (8 hours to San Antonio, rather than 24+ hours to go 50 miles, like most people).
By the way, the wife is re-upping her foreign citizenship, so we can have a bug-out option, assuming we can make it out before things get really bad.
I’m not too far from Houston.
I stayed put for Rita and Ike.
No way I was getting into that traffic with Rita.
Friend of mine did. She made it less than 100 miles in 24 hours, closer to 75 miles.
Think of what it would be like if every major city in the US tried to evacuate at the same time.
With Rita people at least had somewhere to go.
Where would people in Houston area go if the Dallas area was also being evacuated?