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Am ranting...

Hate the news reporters on the ground....trying hard now to play the blame game so they can feed THAT as the news once this is over....really hate them at this moment.

No one was “caught off guard”..... Had plenty of time ahead to leave,...the warnings were repeated over and over and over again.....Everyone was told to leave well in advance of landfall......So now they want to blame someone for not forcing them to go. ..

Government can’t save you from mother nature... it’s peoples responsibility to make sure they have common sense.....do their own thinking....if wrong decision then hopefully someone will help...and be grateful when they do!

They said up to 50 inches even ‘before’ it made landfill..so?.......You look at the RADAR yourself, see a MAGOR HURRICANE coming that is going to hang around for days.... and THEN think you need to ASK SOMEONE ELSE what to do???????

So tired of people blaming Mayors, Governors, and all the infighting about this.....it’s pretty apparent there were no favorable choices ‘the city’ could take .....but there were choices the people could make....

Note...:According to the Houston Chronicle, an estimated 2.5 million people fled the city during Hurricane Rita...... More than 100 people died while leaving..... The newspaper wrote that the evacuation created “some of the most insane gridlock in U.S. history!”...... More than 100 evacuees died in the exodus.
Drivers waited in traffic for 20-plus hours, and heat stroke impaired or killed dozens... Fights broke out on the highway. A bus carrying nursing home evacuees caught fire, and 24 died.”

Currently 5 have died....I think NOT forcing an evacuation was the best choice.....people on roof tops are way safer than people on highways.

Thanks for letting me rant....

This evacuation thing...

I see little engineering type analysis of how to approach this question / problem for an area like the Houston area. (Far more than just the city of Houston is involved.) First, one asks the right questions:

How many people actually need to be evacuated or at least temporarily relocated? Maybe 1 million, worst case??

What is the transportation system’s capacity to move people, starting with the most vulnerable areas first (sort of a “people per hour” dynamic analysis.) (This is a very complex question. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow )

However, some empirical data for any given area should be available...

Cannot military air & medical assets be brought in to clear evacuation accident scenes quickly? (I keep thinking of that scene from “You Only Live Twice” where the bad guys’ car ends up in the bay(!), but that’s FAR from the only sort of actions that can be taken.)

How can Information Tech be better employed to organize evacuation / relocation of vulnerable residents? This is a biggie - maybe as you say, Gov’t can’t save you - but if I get repeated text messages that my house is 80% likely to be in 10 ft. of water in (say) 60 hours, and maybe I’m given an optimum time to leave given various destinations (traffic managment) - well... things like that might help.

And so on...

Of course, there’s also stupidity to be overcome. I was willing to be somewhat “lenient” in judgement of Houston’s mayor, until I heard him say his evacuation decisions were based on the predicted path of Harvey NOT hitting Houston. Good Lord! Does this man not listen to / watch the forecasts or understand days out that in this case the big threat was the rain / flooding, and where that flooding was likely to occur? Is he so ignorant of Houston’s history of flooding in much lesser events? Can he not comprehend a simple map showing Houston right in the predicted area of incredibly high rainfall? Ditto for inundation maps. Even if only 200k additional of the most vulnerable (ie., water over rooftops) residents could have been evacuated, it would have helped a lot. I’m sorry, this guy should be bounced out on his butt.