
Houston’s Mayor Was Right to Not Evacuate - jpdus
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/opinion/harvey-flooding-mayor-evacuation.html
======
jccooper
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.

~~~
ryanackley
In hindsight, it worked out OK for most people. Most of the time it does. The
problem is that sometimes it turns out really really bad. I'm from Florida and
I worked in construction during college. I was down in South Florida after
Andrew. Ground zero was like a warzone. No street signs, traffic lights, etc.
Almost every single house was missing a roof. There was no place to buy fuel,
food, and water. I saw a lot of human misery. Especially among the poorer
population. It was like this for months because of the scale of devastation.
We still feel the effects of Andrew in FL. We probably have the most stringent
building codes in the country and the highest insurance rates.

Major catastrophes like Andrew and Katrina are black swans. Nobody predicts
the level of devastation ahead of time. It's usually hindisght, like "it was
so obvious!". Therefore, I think it's ignorant to not at least advise people
to evacuate at some point. Maybe not 2 hours before the storm hits. Days
maybe? They always do advise evacuation of coastal regions here in FL. I
always listen too.

~~~
eximius
Katrina was not a poor prediction of the _storm_ , it was the levee that broke
combined with a depressed geometry that made it so disastrous.

And we could not have advised people to evacuate days ahead. Thursday morning,
it was just a tropical storm. Suddenly, around lunchtime, it was a category 3
and my business launched business continuity planning procedures. By the end
of the day, it was a cat 4. It made landfall the next day. Evacuation would
have only put those people outdoors when the storm hit.

~~~
ryanackley
You have made my point twice. Nobody predicted the levee was going to break.
Nobody predicted Harvey would be a Cat 4 by the time it made landfall. There
is no way to know which storm is going to be the "big one" until the
aftermath. Therefore, we shouldn't assume there is no need to evacuate.

Related news: a levee south of Houston was just breached.
[https://twitter.com/BrazoriaCounty/status/902539081841827842](https://twitter.com/BrazoriaCounty/status/902539081841827842)

~~~
eximius
Nobody assumed there was no need to evacuate - the problem is that evacuations
make things worse unless you have time. And declaring an evacuation over every
tropical storm would just desensitize people.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
To expand on that point slightly: Houston uses interstates as extra storm
water collection areas. That is, the interstates are at lower elevation than
the surrounding area, so the water collects there rather than (or at least
before) flooding other areas. If you have an evacuation ordered, where the
people don't have enough time to get out, you have huge numbers of people in
cars sitting on those interstates as the water starts rising. That is _not_ a
healthy scenario.

Of course, you now get the opposite problem. My brother-in-law's neighborhood
now has a mandatory evacuation. But now nobody can get out, because the roads
are already covered...

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nsxwolf
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.

~~~
chrisco255
In Florida it is standard procedure to order evacuation of ANY city facing
direct impact by hurricane. Florida, unlike Texas, is a heavily populated
peninsula with only two or three major interstates leading out of the state.
Do not tell me Houston is incapable of evacuation. It's no bigger than Miami
and Houston residents have many more directions to disperse than Floridians.

~~~
rayiner
Houston is over six times larger than Miami.

~~~
chrisco255
Don't know where you're getting your numbers.

Miami Metro pop:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+metro+population&rlz=1...](https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+metro+population&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS755US755&oq=miami+metro+population&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.5213j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+metro+pop&rlz=1C1CHB...](https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+metro+pop&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS755US755&oq=houston+metro+pop&aqs=chrome..69i57.3605j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

5.5 million vs. 6.5 million. Quite comparable. (can't just look at city limits
for pop numbers)

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iamnotlarry
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.

~~~
dheera
> making three round trips every 24 hours

This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In
Japan those trains could _easily_ make 100-200 round trips a day. And there
would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.

Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities? Three times a day?
That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.

~~~
mcbits
To make 100 round trips between Houston and Austin, a total of about 33,000
miles, in 24 hours, the train would have to average 1,375 MPH.

~~~
dheera
That's assuming you only have 1 train. Trains leave between Osaka and Tokyo
every few minutes at rush hours, and travel at speeds upto 300 km/h. They are
timed to nearly 1 second accuracy, monitored precisely by computers, and each
station has multiple tracks to buffer the traffic.

Tokyo's station serves 3000 trains daily and some 415K passengers per day as
of 2013.

The Chinese high-speed rail system also deals with similar levels of passenger
traffic. Shanghai's Hongqiao station for instance has no less than 30 tracks,
can hold 10K passengers at the same time, and comfortably serves an _average_
of 210K passengers per day (much more on holidays), and it is only one of a
few railway stations serving the area.

Trains scale well if you do them right. Technology has come a long way.

~~~
malinens
Tokyo and Shanghai has MUCH more people compared to Houston and it makes more
economical sense to have more train infrastructure

~~~
dheera
Tokyo's population is about 4 times that of Houston. So fine, instead of
running 3000 trains a day from the central station, you can run at least 750?

That's what life would look like if people in the US actually used trains on a
regular basis.

In any case, all I'm saying is that if a massive number of people need to be
moved, trains _can_ scale well, additional reserve capacity can be deployed
during evacuations, and it's also a lot safer than having hundreds of
thousands of people taking to the roads in bad weather.

~~~
peapicker
Googling Houston metropolitan population gives 6.5 million. For Tokyo you get
over 37 million. So Tokyo is 5.7 times Houston. Having been both places,
Houston is much smaller. Houston also can't build subways, they'd always be
flooding.

~~~
dheera
If you include the entire metropolitan area, then there are many, many more
train stations to factor in than just the central stations. But in any case,
order-of-magnitude wise you get the idea. Houston isn't that small and many
cities around the world with even 1 million people have excellent public
transportation.

------
xbmcuser
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
Why didn't they use trains or buses? That seems like a more obvious approach
IMO.

~~~
brewdad
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You don't need a _station_ , you just need a _track_. You can load at any
point where there's a track with a flat area beside it.

The tricks are getting people to that loading point (without their cars,
because you don't have enough parking for what you're trying to do), and
getting the trains from that point to out of town without having to cross a
flooded area.

Houston has plenty of tracks. I presume it has flat areas next to tracks.
Getting out of town without having to cross flooding? I don't know. _Enough_
tracks to hold the traffic that would be needed? Probably not.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Forgot tracks, what about actual _trains_. The passenger rail system in Texas
is tiny.

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terravion
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)

------
Yhippa
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.

~~~
colechristensen
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.

~~~
gizmo686
>leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.

This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations;
unless your plan is based on the _you_ leaving, while most of the population
stays.

>Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let
actuaries price the risk, problem solved.

Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is
useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address: human
life. Unless your plan is for flood insurance to drive down the population in
the region; which might work long term, but we still need to figure out how to
handle the situation until then.

>If the bad half of global warming predictions happen.

This is the bad half of global warming predictions. The only question left is
how bad the even worse half will be.'\

>If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to
have to pay for it collectively.

Why wouldn't people have motivation to fix it? Aid is not going to be enough
to compensate for all the damages (not event counting indirect economic
damage). Everyone, from individuals, to municipalities, to the state, to the
federal government, will come out of this in the red.

~~~
notatoad
>Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is
useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address

It does if legally required - the point isn't to finance the evacuation, it's
to make living in a flood plain financially unattractive. It's the "let the
market decide" approach to disaster planning, by pricing in the cost of
disaster instead of externalizing it to FEMA and the Red Cross.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The risk of death is already priced in; FEMA and the Red Cross aren't helping
with it.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's not priced in. People are more likely to just hope it doesn't happen to
them. If you force both insurance and evacuations then the risks are actually
priced in, with deaths minimized and a constant cost of living bump instead of
tons of people gambling their lives and livelihood.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> It's not priced in. People are more likely to just hope it doesn't happen to
> them.

That doesn't establish that it isn't priced in. It establishes that the value
people place on their own lives isn't as high as you think it should be.

~~~
Dylan16807
This applies to things like houses with objective values too. People don't
treat risks rationally.

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thewhitetulip
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
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
Yes, but your political system isn't like ours. In Indian system outsiders
can't get elected. There are four parties which dominate everything.

------
rdiddly
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
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
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
[https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-
ma...](https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-made-worse-
by-unchecked-urban-development-and-wetland-destruction/)

------
dabei
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
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.

------
roel_v
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?

------
xname2
What I heard is that residents started evacuation by themselves a couple days
in advance.

------
balance_factor
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.

~~~
linkregister
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.

~~~
bonesss
It's not either/or, it's both/and: climate change and city planning are
orthogonal to one another.

> Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?

That's highly odd way to phrase the question.

Climate change is responsible for more energy in the oceans, which is
responsible for more, bigger, storms. Bigger storms mean more damage per
storm. Climate and weather are different. The climate changing in a manner
that makes the weather more extreme will always contribute to damage, but will
never be "responsible" for it as it will always be the weather causing the
damage...

So: this is the third "once in 500 years" event in 3 years. That is what
"climate change" looks like. These storms "suddenly" popping up? Climate
change means more of that, as we have been seeing and can demonstrate
statistically. The long term prognosis? Thanks to climate change it's worse,
with these rare events becoming ever more frequent, and the extent of damages
growing over time.

Our climate is provably changing, from human activity. This is very clear.
Barring holodecks there are no primary causes for weather than climate...
Change that climate away from what our society is adapted for and expect pain.

~~~
chrisco255
What other "once in 500 years" event occurred? Having a hard time coming up
with a storm this disastrous since Katrina, which was a mere Cat 3 hurricane
that happened to break a bunch of levies protecting a sub sea level city. That
was an engineering failure. Nothing extraordinary about Katrina as a
hurricane. Hurricanes are naturally occurring disasters that have pummeled
coast lines for billions of years. Climate change is surely occurring but it
hasn't had a dramatic effect on hurricanes as of yet. We've got catostrophic
storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Harvey...none of
this is new.

~~~
bonesss
[https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/8/28/16211392/10...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/8/28/16211392/100-500-year-flood-meaning)

This story has also been in the NYT, as I recall:

> Tomball, Texas, Public Works director David Esquivel told a local paper
> there this year that the Houston area had “two 500-year storms back to
> back”: over Memorial Day weekend of 2015 and early April 2016. That means
> that Hurricane Harvey constitutes the third “500-year” flood in three years.

Rare meteorological events do not correlate to large scale disasters, per se.
They only reflect the probability of the underlying event happening in any
given year. Imagine that your nearest creek "flooding" by 2 inches should only
happen every thousand years, for example.

> We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew,
> Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.

Aaaaand here's the fundamental confusion with those kinds of summaries: what
is the difference between speed and acceleration?

We have always had bad weather. Having more bad weather than before, more
frequently, is the issue. Climate change did not invent the hurricane. Climate
change ensures our hurricanes will be bigger, more frequent, and more likely
to combine with other larger, more frequent, weather systems. See Sandy, for
example.

~~~
chrisco255
Take a look: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/one-
hundred...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/one-hundred-
years-of-hurricanes/)

The past decade has been pretty lull as far as hurricanes go in the Atlantic
and Caribbean. We haven't seen closer to the activity that they saw in the 50s
and 60s in my lifetime.

~~~
bonesss
You have failed to read and/or grok my post :(

The "number of hurricanes" is irrelevant. Arguably it is misleading: many
small hurricanes is much more human friendly than a few monster hurricanes.
Climate predictions are solid on more intense hurricanes that last longer,
have more rainfall in the short term, and additionally increase with (mild)
frequency in the decades to come.

At the same time, hurricanes are a specific weather incident with no
reflection on the broader climate (monsoons, tropical storms, cyclones,
Pacific/atlantic differences, el ninos, etc etc).

At the same same time changing the goalposts of the conversation from number
of "once in 500 years" to "how many hurricanes" is in-congruent. As I pointed
out: rare events do not directly correlate to extreme events.

TBH: climate trolls and sceptics on the net really need to up their game. This
stuff was played out in the 90s. Any information anyone is honestly missing on
this topic is readily available in google, so at this point one has to assume
that ignorance is willful.

