The tweet: “Please think twice before trying to leave Houston en masse. No evacuation orders have been issued for the city. #Harvey”
That sounds like a polite way of saying “don’t evacuate”.
Yeah, he could get a lot of trouble from that.
And if he said "evacuate" and six million people tried to hit the road? How much trouble would that have caused?
An evacuation would have been a catastrophe with a higher death rate than the hurricane.
We learned our lesson from Rita.
100 people died on the roads, and no one got anywhere. And that was with more lead time and about a million fewer people.
You should look up the history of the evacuation for hurricane Rita. Thousands of cars stranded on highways that had become parking lots. If Rita had actually hit Houston, thousands would have died on those highways. There are 6.5 million in Harris county alone. 4 days prior, Harvey was forcasted as a weak tropical storm. By the time Harvey amounted to anything, evacuation of all but the coastal regions was out of the question. The Houston coastal regions did not get hit that bad.
Could you imagine the number of fatalities if people had evacuated? Harvey wasn’t even a hurricane until 12:00 PM Thursday. Thirty hours later it was a category 4.
How do you evacuate 6.5 million people in the greater Houston area? Where do they go?