My Granpa was IN Houston in 1900,,The Story Has Been Passed Down Through The Family,,,Ain't Happy !!
I'm glad he wasn't in Galveston - you might not be here.
Hurricanes are what they are. The rare ones are predictable. Most are not.
Weather is a science, but it's one that we least understand. We're better at it in the mid-term than either the short term or long term.
That's nobody's fault.
The more you learn about it, the more you realize how complicated it is. It's not even a closed environment you can study. Effects from the solar system have a major effect and our learning curve on that is quite steep.
We do guesses based on past information and assumptions about new conditions we speculate will occur.
With Ernesto, those predictions pretty much stunk. But Mother Nature is what she is. We don't put the same demands on the NGS to warn us exactly when and where the next volcano will erupt.