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And you can't make people leave. I remember yelling at my television "get out, people!" when they were told that Katrina was going to wipe them off them off the map. Yet there they sat, not wanting to leave their "stuff". Not believing the news "hype". Elderly people refused to leave with their children, and died. As someone who evacuated to Tennessee during Cat 1 Isaac, I will never understand.
Many have no place to go or the ability to get there.
Some refuse to go and then require others to risk their own lives rescuing them.
There is no reasonable way to evacuate the Houston metro area.
<>The new FEMA head was confirmed in June, just 2 months after his nomination. Only 4 Senators voted against him. His philosophy is that states need to shoulder more of the burden of disaster relief.
<>
FEMA has never been particularly useful. Here's a section of the 1992 Hurricane Andrew article from wiki:
"The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was criticized for
its slow response in both Florida and Louisiana. Even a month prior to Andrew,
the House Committee on Appropriations – which oversees the budget for FEMA –
released a report calling the agency a "political dumping ground" and a "turkey farm"
due to its "weak, inexperienced leaders". Congressman S. William Green of New York,
a member of the Appropriations Committee, stated that he believed the agency
learned little from its botched response to Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
However, Green also criticized local officials for expecting
"them [FEMA] to come and run the whole show".
Some FEMA officials responded that it was impossible to respond
as they had been requested while also continuing to provide aid for the Los Angeles riots.
FEMA spokesman Grant Peterson stated,
"24 hours is not reasonable to expect to have all the resources of the
federal government landing in the middle of a disaster." Which is why FEMA should not be an action agency, just a planning department.
Good reason to "gut" it IMHO and have it only do long range planning for action by the States.
Yes, and let's not absolve Obama and his lack of response to Katrina. These people seem to have forgotten that. But, everything is Trump's fault! Stupid asses!
nonsenseguy... really? You do know O wasn't the president then, right? right??
Let me explain this to you. Our governor advised evacuation. He said we should leave for our safety. Our mayor advised staying where we are. How do Houstonians deal with this conflicting advice? The mayor said we should stay because the 6+ million people in the Houston metro area would clog the streets so bad we would not be able to escape safely, even though we have anti flow evacuation routes. And while we're on the subject of elderly people, many of them don't have kids living in their city, or kids who care about them. They can't drive, don't have cars, whatever. There are reasons people won't leave, and it isn't just materialism. Someone said we should pay more taxes to help with flooding. We have been paying an extra "drainage fee" for 7 years now. It hasn't done any good at all.
I don't need anything explained to me. I think for myself. I see a Cat 2 coming, I'm outta here. Where do I go? I have friends way up in Kiln, Gulfport, Wiggins, Ocean Springs, Woolmarket, Gautier, Meridian, Picayune, Tupelo. If that's not far enough I have more friends in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Iowa, and plenty of family in Michigan. We have 5 children to think about and protect. Nobody needs to tell me to leave. For that matter, nobody could make me stay.
You may say, "Well if you're so easily panicked about little old storms, you shouldn't live on the coast!" And I would say I completely agree with you. I can't wait to get out of "paradise".
Last edited by SouthernProper; 08-28-2017 at 09:33 AM..
The one interview that stands out for me is with the Mayor of Houston where he was asked why he did not evacuate. He said that it would have been too challenging to manage traffic evacuation. I think that was a huge mistake and error in judgement. Photos of senior citizens in care homes sitting in water up to their armpits is disgraceful. Evacuations could have been prioritized to reduce the number of tragic scenarios we see today.
Maybe we need to see photos of the elderly that died on a bus, stuck on an expressway for 24+ hours along with hundreds of thousands of cars, during the Rita evacuation. The bus caught on fire and 24 elderly passengers died. I imagine that was not a pretty sight.
I would take sitting in flood waters up to my arm pits over sitting on a burning bus in the middle of an expressway with no way to be rescued. How about you?
But the President has been criticized for continuing his vacation at Martha's Vineyard instead of visiting the flood zone and victims.
Louisiana paper to Obama: Cut your vacation short
I have been on vacation on a barrier island with a permanent population of about 7000, on the Gulf when the evacuation was invoked. As a non-resident, we were amongst the first to cut our vacation short. Then again, most island residents who are employed work on the mainland. It literally took hours to cross the bridge to the mainland and hours more to get to Fort Myers airport for what is normally a 30-minute trip.
This was thousands. Houston is millions. Houston Metro is closing in on 7 million and adding almost 500,000 a year, mostly in Harris Cty.
It is not reasonable to expect millions to evacuate a metro area of this size.
The population of Miami/Ft Lauderdale/West Palm Beach is about 6.7 million, and evacuating everyone is not an option. People would be stuck on I-95 and Turnpike going North, and worse, on Alligator Alley going West, which is completely exposed and elevated in the middle of the Everglades swamp. This is why they never recommend a mass-evacuation. You could order evacuations in some areas like Ft Lauderdale, but hurricanes can turn, like Andrew did when it his Miami/Homestead.
Correct. I hope Turner gets fired. He is indirectly responsible for 5 deaths, IMO. We had many days of knowledge that this would be the worst tropical storm/hurricane in history (it looks like it is), and he told us to stay because he was concerned about traffic
Research deaths of people avoiding Rita.
An odd factoid: The only death attributed to the TMI disaster was a young man who fell off his parents boat when they evacuated to Baltimore.
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