What do you think about this - fairly accurate summary?
I've been watching Turner since he'd been elected (I live north of Houston proper and out of his jurisdiction), and he never struck me as the type to do that. He's a local who "grew up" in the Houston political machine, and has been wanting to be mayor for a very long time. I've been impressed with his appearances during the hurricane press conferences. He seems to know what he's doing, and marshalling all the agencies at his disposal. He does not appear to be behaving like Ray Nagin.
During the storm, many local jurisdiction leaders were stopping short of mandating evacuations, saying they didn't want to put emergency responders in danger over stubborn people who refused to leave.
I've been told by long-time locals that, because Houston is so flat, the highway system was designed to become water catch-basins during severe storms. This was intentional to keep the water out of neighborhoods. This is why the roads become impassable and the city gridlocks, but the homes don't flood.
I think this is so much bigger than anyone expected. I hear people say that when Houston evacuated from Ike, people only made it as far as Conroe because the roads were stopped. It may be that it is just too impractical to evacuate a city the size of Houston in such a short period of time.
Today's situation is aggravated by the release of water in the dams. Yesterday, officials were thanking the citizen responders with flat boats, saying that today "professional" help would be arriving. However, the citizens are not stopping, and they are proving useful as their boats can get into areas where the flooding is not deep enough for many of the new vehicles that are arriving.
Now we are waiting for the water up north to flow down through Houston as it makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
-PJ
I tend to agree with you.
If people in Houston were told to evacuate, where were they to evacuate to? If they went north and the storm went up there and stalled, they could have been in a dangerous situation then. No one knew the exact point where the storm would stall. I’ve seen hurricane predictions for many years and it seems that most times they’re wrong. My family has evacuated before as they requested and it put us right in the worst area of a storm.
No one knew for certain that the worst flooding wasn’t going to be 100 miles northeast.
I don’t like anyone that votes democrat and I’ll blame them for when they’re wrong (99.99999% of the time) but there was no way of knowing in this situation.