BREAKING: Houston Mayor Has Vanished!

If this were a Republican mayor would the media give him/her a fair evaluation?

BTW...I do agree there wasn't much chance of evacuation. The storm did come up very quick.

Telling people that fears of 40 ~~ounces~~ inches of rain are unfounded isn’t honest either.

Now you've changed the topic.

This thread was about alleging that the mayor was hiding from the governor, presumably over the disagreement about evacuating.

But let's talk about the inches. Here is a USA Today story from last Wednesday:

Tropical Depression Harvey redeveloped Wednesday morning in the Bay of Campeche and is forecast to roar into the Texas or Louisiana coast as a hurricane later this week.
[snip]
Harvey is expected to produce total rain accumulations of 10 to 15 inches with isolated maximum amounts of 20 inches over the middle and upper Texas coast and southwest Louisiana through next Tuesday. Heavy rainfall could begin as early as Friday morning.
[snip] At Wednesday's City Council meeting, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said now is the time for citizens to prepare, encouraging everyone to make an emergency kit, minimize travel and monitor conditions, according to KHOU-TV.

Google-cached KHOU12 CBS New Story from last Wednesday:

HOUSTON – The National Hurricane Center says Harvey developed into a Tropical Storm late Wednesday night.
[snip]
According to the current forecast track, it will make landfall over Corpus Christi late Friday night. But Houston will be on the "dirty" side of this system, warns KHOU 11 Chief Meteorologist David Paul and there is the chance for heavy rainfall and flooding the entire weekend and last until Wednesday.
"For we here in Houston, it is the flooding threat that will be a threat extended over several days that is most concerning," says Paul.
Paul says we could see rain totals that exceed 15 to 20 inches in some areas.
[snip]
While weather alerts are in effect for our area, KHOU 11 Meteorologist Brooks Garner says he does not believe there will be any in-land evacuations called for, although coastal communities could be impacted by a storm surge. Residents need to prepare to possibly shelter in place if flooding occurs.

This is what Mayor Turner was being briefed on, as early as last Wednesday, if you believe that the local news station reports inform the mayor. I don't know where the 50 inch rainfall number comes from.

-PJ

There are tried and true methods of moving large numbers of people away from threatened coastal areas that I don’t see being implemented such as “contraflow.” That would be reversing the direction of one side of a multilane highway in order to double the vehicle capacity outbound and inland away from the threat. This has been done in Miami/Dade and numerous other areas including the Carolinas. If set up, drilled and agreed upon well beforehand, with designated sections evacuated one by one in priority of risk exposure, it absolutely does not have to be a death trap of a parking lot going on for hundreds of miles. Yes Houston is a huge metro, but being somewhat inland the entire city would not need to be evacuated, just the known flood risks, the very low-lying areas, alongside rivers, creeks and bayous. I’m surprised such a preparedness step has not been taken there. This was known to be a potentially historic storm from a standpoint of rain accumulation well before landfall. It was on a weekend, so commuter traffic would not have been a major issue. There’s no reason for there not to be such a plan for the entire coastal region. Make it optional if need be to placate the Texan independent streak, but those who choose to remain in the face of an implemented evacuation should have to take the morbid steps that sheriffs and police have been telling evac refuseniks for decades, mark your social security number on your arm with an indelible marker for identification, police and emergency personnel very well will be unable to reach you in the event that you get into trouble.

I think the Mayor should have advised those who have a place to go to do so. But, requiring a mandatory evacuation of 4M people would have been a catastrophe.

He didn't even have the sense to advise the first part. But I was there halfway between Houston and Galveston, and I talked to a local cop who said exactly that: if you have a place to go, good on you for evacuating. Apparently he has a lot more common sense than the incompetent mayor of Houston (by the way there was plenty of talk in the days leading to this event about how vulnerable Houston is to flood damage). That was just as we were loading the car to leave last Thursday night.

I'm glad we did, though I dread returning to see what happened to the possessions we left behind.

Why am I not surprised?

The contra flow idea was raised after the last botched evacuation didn’t get very far. Doubling the 4 or 6 outbound lanes in the city would get a lot of vehicles on the road and moving for 20 to 50 miles until the outbound lanes reduced to 2 and in some areas 1. Doubling that gives a maximum of 4 lanes and in some areas 2. Where you try to converge 8 to 12 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic onto 2 to 4 lanes, the plan falls apart. You wind up with thousands of frightened and angry people stranded in virtually unpopulated country with no fuel, water, or food. As a friend told me, I would rather escape the rising water by climbing onto my roof than being stranded on the highway in no mans land. The best laid plans ....

Houston is the population center where smaller cities and towns on the coast go for refuge but there is no place for Houston’s population to turn. There is probably not 3000 hotel rooms within 200 miles north or west of Houston. Medical facilities - forget it.

Miami, not sure.. Col. Plummer (our base Commander) gave us about 6 hours :/ many were stranded on-base. Andrew’s eye hit dead center of Homestead AFB :p

All I can really remember is about 12 lanes of traffic going 1 way on the interstate.. slowly (and even on the shoulders). Police were there to direct traffic.. I think it was the State Troopers.

“#1 STOP BEING THE ASSHAT WHO BUILDS A HOME IN A FLOODPLAIN OR ON THE COAST! There is no excuse, you knew it was coming, you deserve it”

Do you have any effing clue how much of this country is in ‘flood zone’? You can’t just not build there. Floodzones have been the most desirable places to build since ancient Babylon.

Anyone who needs a government hack, bureaucrat, or even worse - a politician - to tell them when they should evacuate an area... When we have all the information we have available to us today on television and the Internet...

Is part of the problem - not part of the solution.