[sustran] Re: Rita, Texas, traffic - and nine little words

Lee Schipper SCHIPPER at wri.org
Mon Sep 26 03:58:46 JST 2005


This should be good fodder for those US right wingers who proclaim cars
were the only way to be saved. in fact it was cars
that almost cost so many their lives had they been trapped in a worse
situation!

>>> eric.britton at ecoplan.org 9/25/2005 10:21:43 PM >>>
Dear Friends,

Most of the following you will have picked up already, but I want to
draw to your attention what I regard as an extremely important, a
whoppingly egregious point toward the end of the piece which is
sweetly
hidden there in no more than nine little words. Words to me at least
that scream. And it's not just for Texas, it is but one more sad
example
of how we are not using our brains and tools in organizing our daily
lives.   The phrase? Let me leave it for you to search it out and
ponder
its implications.
***********************************************
 

GRIDLOCK!

By Ralph Blumenthal and David Barstow. From the NY Times, Published:
September 24, 2005

Houston, Sept. 23 - At 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, with Hurricane Rita
gathering strength and aimed at Texas, Mayor Bill White of Houston
ordered mandatory evacuations from low-lying sections of the city
while
urging voluntary evacuations from flood-prone neighborhoods and mobile
homes.

His pleas were entirely consistent with the region's established
evacuation plans, plans that disaster officials had rehearsed and
honed
for years. Under those plans, 1.25 million people, at most, were
expected to leave. The big worry was whether enough people would heed
evacuation orders.

Instead, an estimated 2.5 million people took flight, including tens
of
thousands who lived in relatively safe areas. What was planned as an
orderly evacuation produced scenes of gridlock, chaos and mass
frustration, with Mayor White warning of "deathtrap" highways.

The danger, it turned out, was not that too few would listen, but that
too many did.

In interviews on Friday, state and local officials acknowledged a
glaring flaw in their planning, the failure to account for the
psychological effects of Hurricane Katrina, or what was instantly
labeled "the Katrina effect."

"We had a lot more people evacuated than should have evacuated," said
Frank E. Gutierrez, emergency management coordinator of Harris County,
which includes Houston. "But because of Katrina, the damage that
happened in Louisiana, a lot of people were scared."

If anything, well-intentioned officials magnified the effect by
repeatedly lacing evacuation pleas with reminders of the death toll
and
devastation in New Orleans.

"Don't follow the example of New Orleans," Mayor White pleaded on
Wednesday.

As a result, though, state and local disaster officials struggled with
problems never envisioned in any evacuation plan, 100-mile-long
traffic
jams, dehydrated babies in stifling cars and hundreds of motorists who
simply ran out of gasoline trying to flee on choked roads.

In some cases, government improvised successfully. State employees,
for
example, delivered free gasoline to thousands of stranded motorists.
The
Houston bus system, with help from hundreds of volunteers, distributed
45,000 bottles of water to motorists.

But there were also numerous examples of a sluggish response.

After Mayor White ordered mandatory evacuations, it took nearly 22
hours
for officials to order that all lanes of Interstate 45, the city's
main
evacuation route, be used for traffic leaving Houston. It took an
additional five hours for state transportation officials to execute
the
order.

In the case of U.S. 290, another major evacuation route, county
officials said there were not enough law enforcement officials
available
to close feeder streets and safely manage one-way traffic.

It remains to be seen whether the traffic problems contributed to the
bus explosion outside Dallas early Friday morning that killed at least
24 elderly evacuees from an assisted-living center in Houston. The bus
had taken more than 14 hours to make what is usually a five-hour trip.

Judge Robert Eckels, the highest elected official in Harris County,
defended the overall evacuation effort but acknowledged that officials
did too little to prepare residents for huge traffic problems.

"The biggest flaw in this plan was communications," Judge Eckels said.
"They didn't understand what could happen. They could be 20 hours on
the
road. 'Don't get up here unless you have a full tank of gas.' We did
not
do a good enough job of telling people that you get on the road, it
may
take 20 hours."

A spokesman for the State Transportation Department, Mike Cox, offered
a
different explanation for the preparations. No one could have
predicted,
Mr. Cox said, how many Texans would be so seriously frightened by
Hurricane Katrina.

"Not one of our 15,000 employees is a psychologist," he said.

In defending the response, Mr. Cox stressed the bottom line that
despite
nightmarish delays, millions of Texans made it to safety.

"This was, as best we can tell, probably the largest evacuation in
American history," he said.

Indeed, traffic problems eased noticeably throughout the state on
Friday. Some motorists simply gave up, turned around and returned
home.
At the same time, state and local officials tried to tamp down the
evacuation, emphasizing that residents should hunker down and ride out
the storm if they lived on high ground.

Just as Hurricane Katrina prompted a re-examination of planning in
Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Rita is likely to focus attention
on planning here.

Why didn't Texas plan for an evacuation of this magnitude?

Greg Evans, a disaster planning expert who directs the Institute for
BioSecurity at the St. Louis University School of Public Health, said
state disaster officials too often failed to plan for the worst.

"People just like to believe things aren't going to be as bad as they
are going to be," Dr. Evans said. "Their plans assume that 1.5 million
people will evacuate when the reality is that 2.5 million people are
evacuating.

"All of a sudden, highways are jammed, people are running out of gas.
All these things just spiral."

In September 2004, Gov. Rick Perry ordered the state's Office of
Homeland Security to evaluate evacuation plans. The review, delivered
in
March, identified weaknesses, particularly in the "Houston-Galveston
Evacuation Area."

The weaknesses included evacuation routes not wide enough to "handle
large-scale movements of evacuees," routes that were too low and
flood-prone, radio systems that cannot communicate with one another
and
inadequate monitoring of congestion.

The report made 18 recommendations. State officials said few had put
been put into effect.

One recommendation was to install traffic counters on evacuation
routes
to monitor the heaviest traffic flows. Officials said they expected to
have a plan for the counters by the end of the month.

A spokesman for Mr. Perry did not respond to telephone messages for
comment.

"There can always be a better plan," Judge Eckels said. "The next time
there will be a better plan."
 


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