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May I answer your question?

I knew that the Hurricane was gonna move up the coast towards La. as early as Wed. nite because I stopped watching the local TV stations here in Houston where I live. Very late Wed. nite, the NOAA Website showed the possible strike track move from Matagorda to Freeport, a significant event. On the next update, 4 hours later, it moved again to Galveston and Houston. Clearly, the juxtaposition of the 2 High Pressure systems over Texas was having a strong influence on this storm. By early thurs. morning, the line had moved to just right of East Bay and Trinity Bay. At that point, MSNBC and Max Mayfield of the Hurricane Center in Miami started predicting, with confidence, that the storm would strike the coast early Sat. morning near Port Arthur. Having lived here for 57 years now and watched a number of hurricanes with interest, it was clear to me at least that this forecast was a good one. I then made the informed decision to stay. Here in Clear Lake, we had barely an inch of rain and winds that peaked at maybe 50 miles per hour.

Did Mayfield start telling people from Galveston and Houston there was no need to evacuate?

In my 59 years I've been through one typhoon (watching through a window at Narita International in 1979) and had the remnants of many go by here. My aunt, whose daughter is a cop in Houston, was in Columbia, SC when Hugo didn't just die out after going ashore at Charleston but caused serious damage 100 miles inland. I don't pretend to be able to predict a hurricane's path or determine which prediction is correct, but I have some experience at "crisis coping", a more accurate term than "crisis management". I can tell you for a fact that people who make decisions have to make them based on the information they have at the time rather than what turns out to be true.
Suppose for a second that the Galveston landfall had been correct. When would you have started evacuations so that 1.5 million people could get at least 100 miles away from the coast?
If you want to make a serious point about "hurricane fatigue", then do it. Just spare me the tinfoil hat conspiracy theories.

Very late Wed. nite, the NOAA Website showed the possible strike track move from Matagorda to Freeport,

So, very late Wednesday there was a strong Cat 4/5 storm with a Freeport landfall predicted ... that, my friend, is when I left.

Here in Austin hindsight is a wonderful thing .. but at that time not getting my wife and daughter out of Pearland would have been (dare I say it) STUPID. As I've posted elsewhere, I was working out of Venice, La in 1969 when Camille blew through ... I haven't not left for one since then.

Had the storm come in at Freeport you'd be singing a different tune. I'll opt for "well, that was an unnecessary trip" over "I've risked my life and the lives of those I love" every time.