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I was in Houston for Rita and it really demonstrated the gross inadequacy of modern US disaster planning. That the evacuation panic was more deadly than the sto

I was in Houston for Rita and it really demonstrated the gross inadequacy of modern US disaster planning. That the evacuation panic was more deadly than the storm may be a bit of black irony, but there is simply no way to get millions of people out of a major city in a small number of days. (a friend was stuck in traffic for 18 hours after his wife decided they needed to flee -- then they gave up, turned around and drove ~8 minutes back home to weather the storm in a neighborhood that hadn't flooded during the tropical storm a few years prior that famously drowned IH-10 for miles) Of course then Hurricane Harvey came through and illustrated the questionable unbounded development in a swamp, but not for very long. I like Houston. It's a more cultured and vibrant city than its usually given credit, but it's already living on borrowed time. It's not going to take a whole lot of sea level rise to start inundating the east side and down towards Galveston, and it feels like it won't be long before flood insurance abandons the eastern half of Harris county back to its swampy past.

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BurningFrog 6y ago
> * I was in Houston for Rita and it really demonstrated the gross inadequacy of modern US disaster planning* Yeah, I wouldn't have foreseen that effect either, but to the authorities specifically tasked with planning for that eventuality, it should have been obvious. If, that is, there actually is such an authority?
- reincarnate0x14 6y ago
  I'm not really sure. In theory, it should be the governor of the state working with NOAA and FEMA, but in practice it seems like cities or counties have been mostly left to try and interpret NOAA's information on their own. FEMA is supposed to be the national authority, but has a ... marginal track record a its often headed by political appointees with minimal experience who can coast along just fine for years because nothing major happens -- five near-miss hurricanes mean getting some extra food and water down while the linemen put the power lines back, and it's all easy. Then Katrina or Harvey happens and you find out really quick who has any idea which way is up. The complete impracticality of a large scale evacuation probably precludes any real effort finding its footing. CalFire out in CA is probably one of the better organizations you could look to worldwide in terms of trying to get people out of harms way, it still seems to be mostly on individual communities to figure out how they're going to evacuate once the word comes down. There were some awful stories out of the Camp Fire of people caught by the fire as they were stuck on the limited roads out. And most of those communities are small. I don't think it's possible to evacaute, say, the Bay Area in under a month if you had to do it. Too many people all on the same roads, and while the airports might be able to conceivably move a few hundred thousand passengers a day, you'd still have the problem of getting people TO the airports and coordinating fuel and crew and all that. There probably is a way to get some kind of realistic planning capability in FEMA and the NRCC, but given the near-total failure of the US Congress in the last two decades the likelihood of a major reorganization that put enough real experts in long term positions with goals that weren't tied to immediate events seems like it's about zero. This turned into a bit of rambling digression, but at least from an observer in a vaguely related field of critical infrastructure, it really feels like there has been a serious lack of meaningful leadership outside of the old DOD/NORAD planning for nuclear wars (for which rapid evacuations of populations were basically out of the question from the beginning).

deleted 6y ago

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BurningFrog 6y ago

> * I was in Houston for Rita and it really demonstrated the gross inadequacy of modern US disaster planning* Yeah, I wouldn't have foreseen that effect either, but to the authorities specifically tasked with planning for that eventuality, it should have been obvious. If, that is, there actually is such an authority?

reincarnate0x14 6y ago
I'm not really sure. In theory, it should be the governor of the state working with NOAA and FEMA, but in practice it seems like cities or counties have been mostly left to try and interpret NOAA's information on their own. FEMA is supposed to be the national authority, but has a ... marginal track record a its often headed by political appointees with minimal experience who can coast along just fine for years because nothing major happens -- five near-miss hurricanes mean getting some extra food and water down while the linemen put the power lines back, and it's all easy. Then Katrina or Harvey happens and you find out really quick who has any idea which way is up. The complete impracticality of a large scale evacuation probably precludes any real effort finding its footing. CalFire out in CA is probably one of the better organizations you could look to worldwide in terms of trying to get people out of harms way, it still seems to be mostly on individual communities to figure out how they're going to evacuate once the word comes down. There were some awful stories out of the Camp Fire of people caught by the fire as they were stuck on the limited roads out. And most of those communities are small. I don't think it's possible to evacaute, say, the Bay Area in under a month if you had to do it. Too many people all on the same roads, and while the airports might be able to conceivably move a few hundred thousand passengers a day, you'd still have the problem of getting people TO the airports and coordinating fuel and crew and all that. There probably is a way to get some kind of realistic planning capability in FEMA and the NRCC, but given the near-total failure of the US Congress in the last two decades the likelihood of a major reorganization that put enough real experts in long term positions with goals that weren't tied to immediate events seems like it's about zero. This turned into a bit of rambling digression, but at least from an observer in a vaguely related field of critical infrastructure, it really feels like there has been a serious lack of meaningful leadership outside of the old DOD/NORAD planning for nuclear wars (for which rapid evacuations of populations were basically out of the question from the beginning).