Our society needs to decide between safety and convenience. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail with this, but I'm sure next week's story line will be "Is your city ready for a disaster". This will be the hot topic for the rest of the year, but if these types of evacuations continue in large cities, with the weathermen forecasting incorrectly, then you will see the same type of attitude from people concerning these evacuations as you see with the airports. Do I think that the Houston evacuation went well? With everything being said and done, I think it went well when trying to get everyone out in that short period of time. This isn't Toledo, Baltimore, or even San Diego. This was the fourth largest city in the US, evacuating up to 95% of their people in 4-5 days. And unlike the East Coast, there really isn't anything close to drive to. What do you really expect from Houston local officials? Do you expect them to have buses ready to evacuate everyone in the city? Do you expect them to build another 3 to 4 highways out of the city to handle that one time volume of outgoing traffic? No. But I would of expected them to have enough gas in the area to handle the traffic flow. Other than that, I'm just confused on what the media and others expect Houston officials to do? With the traffic issues and the weathermen being wrong, I can tell you that no matter how big the next storm will be, you will probably only have a 70% evacuation rate. People just don't want to be inconvenienced like this on a continuous basis.
After 9/11, security increased and caused many delays when coming to flying. People put up with it for the first couple of months, but then got tired of it after about 6 months. To this day, I always hear people complaining about the security lines and other airport issues, and it is all driven off of the government trying to make sure we are all safe when flying.
It will be interesting to see how the local and state governments proceed with their emergency plans to make sure that this won't happen in their city. Are they going to raise taxes, build extra highways to handle 99% of the population to evacuate a city in 3 days, create useless agencies that will be called upon once every 50 years? I mean this would cost so much money to complete and maintain. When people plan or live their lives for worst case scenarios, you tend to not get anything done and become very unproductive.
With all of that being said, I am still down in Dallas and it looks as if I will be heading home either tomorrow or Monday, since their isn't much damage to Houston or the surrounding areas. I hate to say this, but is it just me or was everyone hoping for a CAT 5 Hurricane to go into Houston to see what could of happened?
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