12 ms·

Houston’s Mayor Was Right to Not Evacuate

148 points by jpdus 9y ago

thewhitetulip 9y ago
I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor. had this been India, the opponent of the Mayor would have politicized the situation and asked for resignation of the mayor and claimed that it was a mistake to not evacuate.
- Buge 9y ago
  More of a former opponent. I don't think he's running for anything anymore. There's plenty of nasty stuff in US politics as well. This article is refreshing.
  - thewhitetulip 9y ago
    Yes, but your political system isn't like ours. In Indian system outsiders can't get elected. There are four parties which dominate everything.
Yhippa 9y ago
I definitely see that an emergency evacuation for ~6.5 million people would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita. I feel uncomfortable just scaling up for the rescue mission while people hang around. It seems way too reactive. I don't know if there's a more progressive evacuation model that works. I assume it's been tried and has possibly failed.
- trynewideas 9y ago
  The problem with any evacuation plan that requires more than 48 hours of notice is two-fold: 1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead. 2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention. An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens. And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere. And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita. My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit. During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again. If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched. Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again. I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them. They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying. A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better. But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    These are terrible events but you should recognize that statistical odds don't always match up with your individual outcome. Case in point are seat belts. On average they save lives but occasionally to hear of someone getting stuck in a vehicle in such a way that cost them their life. Doesn't change the fact that you should always wear a seat belt...
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      I feel like you ignored the part about the heavy guaranteed cost of evacuation, even when nobody is physically hurt. Imagine if your seat belt caused heavy bruising every use. You wouldn't keep using it.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  Don't live in a flood plane, leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit. Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved. If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
  - taurath 9y ago
    The people who live in flood planes tend to not be the people who can afford insurance.
    - function_seven 9y ago
      True. If the requirement existed the areas were settled, then they wouldn’t be living there. BUT, that’s not the case. So enacting the requirement now, all at once, is probably not the right thing to do. Maybe phase it in? All new construction would require it. Existing residents would get it subsidized for a decade, etc?
      - brewdad 9y ago
        I read that many residents were given subsidized or free flood coverage following Rita. That lasted 3 years and expired almost a decade ago. Few, if any of those policies are still being paid. Still leaves the question of whether we pay for this damage or leave people with nothing. Likely something in between the extremes.
      - lostapathy 9y ago
        This is pretty simple to solve, actually. Once a property is destroyed, pay out the claim as normal, but stop subsidizing insurance on that property. The people who couldn't afford market rate insurance still get paid for the house they lost, but they have to find a safer place to rebuild.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      That’s why you legally require it. Then people who can’t afford it can’t live there and move somewhere else. The expected cost also potentially brings down the price of realestate so people can afford insurance by paying less morgage. Really it comes down to acceptable societal risk. If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? What if it’s every 20 years? Once in 5 years? At some point we can all agree that maybe it shouldn’t be treated as unexpected and precautions should be required. Just like we require everyone to have car insurance.
- keehun 9y ago
  I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts or of flood-resistant design. Anything from a rudimentary elevated home to a fully adjustable Narita-style hydraulic lift system...
  - RandomInteger4 9y ago
    Sadly not likely considering Trump just recently (2 weeks ago?) rolled back flood standards regulations to spite Obama.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    I think you're thinking of KIX's hydraulic system?
    - flukus 9y ago
      Probably more like a Queenslander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) ) house on stilts or something similar. It also helps with cooling which I imagine would be beneficial on the Texas coast. It's remarkably low tech and effective, you can often find 100 year old ones only a meter or two above rivers that regularly flood.
      - rtx 9y ago
        Those are some ugly houses.
        flukus 9y ago
        I disagree. I'd prefer an ugly house over a destroyed house any day though. There's also nothing stopping you from applying the principal in whatever style you prefer.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    > I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts... It is happening in areas hit by Sandy. Other flood-resistant features include raising utility equipment (HVAC, water heaters...) off the ground.
- flukus 9y ago
  Evacuation doesn't have to mean all 6.5 million have to leave, just those in low lying areas. It also doesn't have to mean leaving the city, It looks like the downtown area has plenty of tall buildings that would make for some high density evacuation areas and have rooftop helicopter access for emergencies and food/water drops.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  > would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
terravion 9y ago
Here's the back story that the author mentions on the election. Great to see that partisanship still can be put aside at times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015
xname2 9y ago
What I heard is that residents started evacuation by themselves a couple days in advance.
xbmcuser 9y ago
A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.
- org3432 9y ago
  Why didn't they use trains or buses? That seems like a more obvious approach IMO.
  - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
    You're not from Texas, are you.
  - mozumder 9y ago
    lol what trains & buses?
  - brewdad 9y ago
    There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. If you made it that far, you are probably already out of danger. As for buses, how do you coordinate bus plans for 6.5 million people across a 50 mile by 50 mile area? And then, assuming you could get even a million people onto buses, where do you take them that can handle even a hundred thousand refugees on 24-48 hours notice? For most of the US, and especially a city built like Houston, there are no good options. Edit: I underestimated the size of the Houston Metro Area. It's closer to 100 miles by 100 miles.
    - tzs 9y ago
      > There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. There's a station in Beaumont, which is closer than San Antonio.
    - jen20 9y ago
      No trains? https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=am/am2Station/Station_Page&code=HOS https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=am/am2... That said, it's still not enough to even come close to evacuating a city like Houston.
designcode 9y ago
Hopefully people have all the information at hand to get the idea to evacuate themselves in advance if their situation requires it.
balance_factor 9y ago
The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety. Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way. None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled. Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.
- notruthallowed 9y ago
  Did you know that the rate of hurricanes and other natural disasters has actually been decreasing? Natural gas and coal save more lives in a day than all natural disasters will kill all year.
- linkregister 9y ago
  Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage? Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside? Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    How does attributing extra disasters to it "water down" the risk of climate change? More disasters seems like more risk?
    - pyroinferno 9y ago
      Because when you're an idiot, and blame everything on climate change (even though it's clearly not related) no one is going to believe you the next time you yell "climate change!" even though you may be right.
nsxwolf 9y ago
I was stuck in traffic for 11 hours driving home to Chicago from the solar eclipse in Carbondale, IL. And I only made it half way home and had to stay overnight. That was the eclipse, not a massive natural disaster. I can't even imagine the secondary disaster a mass exodus might have been, with a million cars running out of gas.
- zem 9y ago
  you don't even need to imagine it; hurricane rita had over 100 evacuation-related fatalities, and i'm sure contributed a lot to the decision that evacuation was a bad idea this time.
- Jun8 9y ago
  Was stuck in the same horrible jam, too, finally bailed out and spent the night at a rest area, never saw one so full. Some part of the traffic was caused by poor planning on Illinois' part, having massive construction on 57 at the most inappropriate time.
  - lp251 9y ago
    57 has been under construction since the dawn of time. Nothing new there.
    - otp124 9y ago
      And it's not like they'll just take the night off because of a solar eclipse.
- KGIII 9y ago
  They will oftentimes have a plan for evacuation that has been modeled ahead of time. Of course, they may not follow this plan. They should shut down inbound highways and use both sides for routing traffic out of the affected area. They should keep the breakdown lanes free of all obstructions to allow shuttles to have bi-directional traffic. Don't tow, or repair, personal vehicles that break down, shove them off the paved surface and put the people on the shuttles. Etc... Outbound traffic, properly routed, can be done quite rapidly. It takes cooperation and isn't very polite. It's also going to be a political disaster if the emergency turns out to have not been as bad as expected.
jccooper 9y ago
Houston's a very large place, and while there's bad stuff going on in places, there are also large parts of the city--probably most of it--with no particular damage. I'm in the middle of it right now and know people and organizations all over and most have had little or no problem (though sadly I don't have to go too far in my social graph to find people who left their house via boat). The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal. It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.
- Rapzid 9y ago
  The level of vitriol targeted towards the mayor, usually referred to as "democratic mayor Sylvester Turner", on the internet during the height of this disaster is pretty disgusting.
  - mc32 9y ago
    It's just a sign of political polarization. Like when people say the republican governor of Texas [did something not aligned with Democrat values] when discussing liberal ideas.
    - forapurpose 9y ago
      I'm not going to agree that both sides are the same. There's a serious problem with conservatives demonizing and even dehumanizing those who don't follow their ideology, which IMHO lays the foundation for current conservative leaders. In the U.S. and Europe you can't find significant liberal leaders nearly as extreme and polarizing as many major conservative figures, some of whom are heads of state, nor liberal equivalents for white supremacy and extreme nationalism that are anywhere close to having the support to win power. The left-wing equivalent in the past would have been Communists, but they are very weak - there is no chance for a Communist to win office in any major country; even China's Communists are authoritarian capitalists who have retained the old brand name.
iamnotlarry 9y ago
Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours. That train could evacuate 15K people a day. Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets). Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.
- mc32 9y ago
  But at this time they know the specifically affected areas where people face the danger of rising waters --but mayor still had not called for evacuation. Not a general evacuation, but evacs from the most affected areas in imminent danger. Even NPR is questioning the present stance[1] [1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/why-didn-t-officials-order-the-evacuation-of-houston http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...
  - trynewideas 9y ago
    > Even NPR is questioning the present stance The headline has a question mark at the end; that's the extent of the "questioning". The rest of it lists every point made to support the decision to stay. It even notes at the end that both FEMA[1] and the state government not only refused to question the mayor's decision but backed it. It's not a critical story, and it's disingenuous to suggest that simply because "even NPR" ran an explainer story, that there's some widespread official or credible base of observers "questioning the present stance". [1] Literally: > The head of FEMA, Brock Long, "did not question the decision," Reuters reports.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Did you skip: >But at some point, of course, those floodwaters do become deadly. If lower floors flood completely, Houston's Office of Emergency Management cautioned, residents should never take refuge in the attic unless they have a way out. They could risk being fatally trapped.
dabei 9y ago
The decision of not to evacuate seems justifiable. But the deeper problem is mass evacuation is not even an option. What happens when a disaster that's 10x or 100x bigger comes?
- chrisco255 9y ago
  I'm still, as a Floridian, having a hard time understanding why evacuation is not an option. We have evacuated large cities in Florida many times over the past decades. We have no trains either and more distance to travel to get to total safety than Texans. This comes down to preparation and Houston & Texas dropped the ball.
rdiddly 9y ago
Yeah I dunno if I like the false choice between "evacuate incompetently" and "don't evacuate at all." Could there maybe be a third option of evacuating only the relevant areas (low-lying ones near the bayous), safely and efficiently, via a well-thought-out plan?
- sohkamyung 9y ago
  If I read the article correctly, most of the flooding is due to heavy rains, not storm surge. Even in Singapore, predicting which areas will be flooded due to heavy rains isn't easy, judging from the number of local reports of floods after heavy rains. This will make it difficult to judge which areas to evacuate. This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    Yeah but, hydrologists have a joke: What's the first law of hydrology? Water runs downhill. Which is funny when you're a PhD accustomed to wrangling ridiculously complex multidimensional partial differential equations from fluid dynamics, to say the same thing. But I suppose what ruins any ability to rely on "the first law of hydrology" here is the fact that the whole area is so flat, and so low, and so paved.
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-made-worse-by-unchecked-urban-development-and-wetland-destruction/ https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-ma...
roel_v 9y ago
There must be a lot of 'preppers' in Houston. Maybe it's too early, but does anyone know of any honest 'post mortems' of strategies that people choose beforehand and how it worked out?

148 points by jpdus 9y ago

I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor. had this been India, the opponent of the Mayor would have politicized the situation and asked for resignation of the mayor and claimed that it was a mistake to not evacuate.

Buge 9y ago
More of a former opponent. I don't think he's running for anything anymore. There's plenty of nasty stuff in US politics as well. This article is refreshing.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  Yes, but your political system isn't like ours. In Indian system outsiders can't get elected. There are four parties which dominate everything.

Yhippa 9y ago

I definitely see that an emergency evacuation for ~6.5 million people would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita. I feel uncomfortable just scaling up for the rescue mission while people hang around. It seems way too reactive. I don't know if there's a more progressive evacuation model that works. I assume it's been tried and has possibly failed.

trynewideas 9y ago
The problem with any evacuation plan that requires more than 48 hours of notice is two-fold: 1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead. 2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention. An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens. And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere. And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita. My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit. During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again. If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched. Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again. I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them. They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying. A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better. But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  These are terrible events but you should recognize that statistical odds don't always match up with your individual outcome. Case in point are seat belts. On average they save lives but occasionally to hear of someone getting stuck in a vehicle in such a way that cost them their life. Doesn't change the fact that you should always wear a seat belt...
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    I feel like you ignored the part about the heavy guaranteed cost of evacuation, even when nobody is physically hurt. Imagine if your seat belt caused heavy bruising every use. You wouldn't keep using it.
colechristensen 9y ago
Don't live in a flood plane, leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit. Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved. If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
- taurath 9y ago
  The people who live in flood planes tend to not be the people who can afford insurance.
  - function_seven 9y ago
    True. If the requirement existed the areas were settled, then they wouldn’t be living there. BUT, that’s not the case. So enacting the requirement now, all at once, is probably not the right thing to do. Maybe phase it in? All new construction would require it. Existing residents would get it subsidized for a decade, etc?
    - brewdad 9y ago
      I read that many residents were given subsidized or free flood coverage following Rita. That lasted 3 years and expired almost a decade ago. Few, if any of those policies are still being paid. Still leaves the question of whether we pay for this damage or leave people with nothing. Likely something in between the extremes.
    - lostapathy 9y ago
      This is pretty simple to solve, actually. Once a property is destroyed, pay out the claim as normal, but stop subsidizing insurance on that property. The people who couldn't afford market rate insurance still get paid for the house they lost, but they have to find a safer place to rebuild.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    That’s why you legally require it. Then people who can’t afford it can’t live there and move somewhere else. The expected cost also potentially brings down the price of realestate so people can afford insurance by paying less morgage. Really it comes down to acceptable societal risk. If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? What if it’s every 20 years? Once in 5 years? At some point we can all agree that maybe it shouldn’t be treated as unexpected and precautions should be required. Just like we require everyone to have car insurance.
keehun 9y ago
I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts or of flood-resistant design. Anything from a rudimentary elevated home to a fully adjustable Narita-style hydraulic lift system...
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  Sadly not likely considering Trump just recently (2 weeks ago?) rolled back flood standards regulations to spite Obama.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  I think you're thinking of KIX's hydraulic system?
  - flukus 9y ago
    Probably more like a Queenslander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) ) house on stilts or something similar. It also helps with cooling which I imagine would be beneficial on the Texas coast. It's remarkably low tech and effective, you can often find 100 year old ones only a meter or two above rivers that regularly flood.
    - rtx 9y ago
      Those are some ugly houses.
      - flukus 9y ago
        I disagree. I'd prefer an ugly house over a destroyed house any day though. There's also nothing stopping you from applying the principal in whatever style you prefer.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  > I wonder if it'll be increasingly common to see houses on stilts... It is happening in areas hit by Sandy. Other flood-resistant features include raising utility equipment (HVAC, water heaters...) off the ground.
flukus 9y ago
Evacuation doesn't have to mean all 6.5 million have to leave, just those in low lying areas. It also doesn't have to mean leaving the city, It looks like the downtown area has plenty of tall buildings that would make for some high density evacuation areas and have rooftop helicopter access for emergencies and food/water drops.
BurningFrog 9y ago
> would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.

terravion 9y ago

Here's the back story that the author mentions on the election. Great to see that partisanship still can be put aside at times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015

xname2 9y ago

What I heard is that residents started evacuation by themselves a couple days in advance.

xbmcuser 9y ago

A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.

org3432 9y ago
Why didn't they use trains or buses? That seems like a more obvious approach IMO.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  You're not from Texas, are you.
- mozumder 9y ago
  lol what trains & buses?
- brewdad 9y ago
  There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. If you made it that far, you are probably already out of danger. As for buses, how do you coordinate bus plans for 6.5 million people across a 50 mile by 50 mile area? And then, assuming you could get even a million people onto buses, where do you take them that can handle even a hundred thousand refugees on 24-48 hours notice? For most of the US, and especially a city built like Houston, there are no good options. Edit: I underestimated the size of the Houston Metro Area. It's closer to 100 miles by 100 miles.
  - tzs 9y ago
    > There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. There's a station in Beaumont, which is closer than San Antonio.
  - jen20 9y ago
    No trains? https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=am/am2Station/Station_Page&code=HOS https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=am/am2... That said, it's still not enough to even come close to evacuating a city like Houston.

designcode 9y ago

Hopefully people have all the information at hand to get the idea to evacuate themselves in advance if their situation requires it.

balance_factor 9y ago

The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety. Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way. None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled. Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.

notruthallowed 9y ago
Did you know that the rate of hurricanes and other natural disasters has actually been decreasing? Natural gas and coal save more lives in a day than all natural disasters will kill all year.
linkregister 9y ago
Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage? Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside? Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  How does attributing extra disasters to it "water down" the risk of climate change? More disasters seems like more risk?
  - pyroinferno 9y ago
    Because when you're an idiot, and blame everything on climate change (even though it's clearly not related) no one is going to believe you the next time you yell "climate change!" even though you may be right.

nsxwolf 9y ago

I was stuck in traffic for 11 hours driving home to Chicago from the solar eclipse in Carbondale, IL. And I only made it half way home and had to stay overnight. That was the eclipse, not a massive natural disaster. I can't even imagine the secondary disaster a mass exodus might have been, with a million cars running out of gas.

zem 9y ago
you don't even need to imagine it; hurricane rita had over 100 evacuation-related fatalities, and i'm sure contributed a lot to the decision that evacuation was a bad idea this time.
Jun8 9y ago
Was stuck in the same horrible jam, too, finally bailed out and spent the night at a rest area, never saw one so full. Some part of the traffic was caused by poor planning on Illinois' part, having massive construction on 57 at the most inappropriate time.
- lp251 9y ago
  57 has been under construction since the dawn of time. Nothing new there.
  - otp124 9y ago
    And it's not like they'll just take the night off because of a solar eclipse.
KGIII 9y ago
They will oftentimes have a plan for evacuation that has been modeled ahead of time. Of course, they may not follow this plan. They should shut down inbound highways and use both sides for routing traffic out of the affected area. They should keep the breakdown lanes free of all obstructions to allow shuttles to have bi-directional traffic. Don't tow, or repair, personal vehicles that break down, shove them off the paved surface and put the people on the shuttles. Etc... Outbound traffic, properly routed, can be done quite rapidly. It takes cooperation and isn't very polite. It's also going to be a political disaster if the emergency turns out to have not been as bad as expected.

jccooper 9y ago

Houston's a very large place, and while there's bad stuff going on in places, there are also large parts of the city--probably most of it--with no particular damage. I'm in the middle of it right now and know people and organizations all over and most have had little or no problem (though sadly I don't have to go too far in my social graph to find people who left their house via boat). The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal. It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.

Rapzid 9y ago
The level of vitriol targeted towards the mayor, usually referred to as "democratic mayor Sylvester Turner", on the internet during the height of this disaster is pretty disgusting.
- mc32 9y ago
  It's just a sign of political polarization. Like when people say the republican governor of Texas [did something not aligned with Democrat values] when discussing liberal ideas.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    I'm not going to agree that both sides are the same. There's a serious problem with conservatives demonizing and even dehumanizing those who don't follow their ideology, which IMHO lays the foundation for current conservative leaders. In the U.S. and Europe you can't find significant liberal leaders nearly as extreme and polarizing as many major conservative figures, some of whom are heads of state, nor liberal equivalents for white supremacy and extreme nationalism that are anywhere close to having the support to win power. The left-wing equivalent in the past would have been Communists, but they are very weak - there is no chance for a Communist to win office in any major country; even China's Communists are authoritarian capitalists who have retained the old brand name.

iamnotlarry 9y ago

Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours. That train could evacuate 15K people a day. Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets). Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.

mc32 9y ago
But at this time they know the specifically affected areas where people face the danger of rising waters --but mayor still had not called for evacuation. Not a general evacuation, but evacs from the most affected areas in imminent danger. Even NPR is questioning the present stance[1] [1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/why-didn-t-officials-order-the-evacuation-of-houston http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...
- trynewideas 9y ago
  > Even NPR is questioning the present stance The headline has a question mark at the end; that's the extent of the "questioning". The rest of it lists every point made to support the decision to stay. It even notes at the end that both FEMA[1] and the state government not only refused to question the mayor's decision but backed it. It's not a critical story, and it's disingenuous to suggest that simply because "even NPR" ran an explainer story, that there's some widespread official or credible base of observers "questioning the present stance". [1] Literally: > The head of FEMA, Brock Long, "did not question the decision," Reuters reports.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Did you skip: >But at some point, of course, those floodwaters do become deadly. If lower floors flood completely, Houston's Office of Emergency Management cautioned, residents should never take refuge in the attic unless they have a way out. They could risk being fatally trapped.

dabei 9y ago

The decision of not to evacuate seems justifiable. But the deeper problem is mass evacuation is not even an option. What happens when a disaster that's 10x or 100x bigger comes?

chrisco255 9y ago
I'm still, as a Floridian, having a hard time understanding why evacuation is not an option. We have evacuated large cities in Florida many times over the past decades. We have no trains either and more distance to travel to get to total safety than Texans. This comes down to preparation and Houston & Texas dropped the ball.

rdiddly 9y ago

Yeah I dunno if I like the false choice between "evacuate incompetently" and "don't evacuate at all." Could there maybe be a third option of evacuating only the relevant areas (low-lying ones near the bayous), safely and efficiently, via a well-thought-out plan?

sohkamyung 9y ago
If I read the article correctly, most of the flooding is due to heavy rains, not storm surge. Even in Singapore, predicting which areas will be flooded due to heavy rains isn't easy, judging from the number of local reports of floods after heavy rains. This will make it difficult to judge which areas to evacuate. This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."
- rdiddly 9y ago
  Yeah but, hydrologists have a joke: What's the first law of hydrology? Water runs downhill. Which is funny when you're a PhD accustomed to wrangling ridiculously complex multidimensional partial differential equations from fluid dynamics, to say the same thing. But I suppose what ruins any ability to rely on "the first law of hydrology" here is the fact that the whole area is so flat, and so low, and so paved.
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-made-worse-by-unchecked-urban-development-and-wetland-destruction/ https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-ma...

roel_v 9y ago

There must be a lot of 'preppers' in Houston. Maybe it's too early, but does anyone know of any honest 'post mortems' of strategies that people choose beforehand and how it worked out?