This was the phrase we heard time and again from the Bush Administration, including Dear Leader himself, when discussing, after the fact, the disintegration of the levies in New Orleans.
Now, we're beginning to hear the same in Texas, but regarding the current disaster, known as the evacuation of Houston and the Texas Gulf coast.
The observation by Perry and others — that problems were inevitable in any endeavor to move more than a million people over a few routes under an emergency time frame — didn't stop criticism about how officials planned for, and implemented, the exodus.Chief among the complaints is that officials at all levels didn't appreciate — or at least articulate — just how crowded roads would get.
Add to that the fact that the Texas Department of Transportation seemed flat-footed in effecting a contraflow plan to ease congestion by moving some outbound traffic into inbound lanes.
Why, some asked, didn't the agency time the lane reversals to coincide with the mandatory evacuations of low-lying neighborhoods and areas threatened by storm surge?
"Why wasn't TxDOT on the same page?" asked Houston City Councilman M.J. Khan, stuck for hours trying to get his elderly mother-in-law to the airport. "Yesterday morning, that should have been part of the plan."
TxDOT said its effort was hampered by the complicated nature of the task and a lack of personnel.
Officials also faced criticism because they didn't plan, or didn't plan adequately, for making sure enough gasoline was available for tens of thousands of vehicles crawling through summer heat.
"It has been completely predictable. You try to shove all that traffic onto a freeway system, and it ain't going to work. There's only so much roadway," said Bill King, a lawyer and former Kemah mayor who's long said the region wasn't adequately prepared for a large-scale evacuation.
"All this about the running out of gas? Well, duh," King said.
Well, this wasn't the first time King was quoted by the Chronicle on the subject. As I posted earlier this week, (now-former) Kemah mayor, Bill King, when interviewed last February about the potential problems, expressed his concern in great detail, as did many others. From the same article I referenced earlier:
Enough road capacity?Local officials also are divided on whether the area's evacuation routes are adequate to handle a full-fledged evacuation of Southeast Texas.
Studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and at Texas A&M University have said the area has enough road capacity to ensure that all endangered residents could be evacuated to safety north of Interstate 10 if they start early enough.
And Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, who is responsible for calling for evacuations in the county, said he believes the evacuation routes could hold the traffic as long as the evacuation begins early enough.
"The key element to that question is `in time,' " Eckels said. "Assuming we have as much notice as they had on the Florida hurricanes ... we could substantially do it. The challenge is coordinating all three counties (Harris, Galveston and Brazoria). It's going to be a massive traffic jam, lots of folks, but I think it can be done."
The state's hurricane planners agree.
Peacock told a group of several hundred emergency officials from the region last month that "the infrastructure will support the evacuation times."
But a large number of those officials from Brazoria, Galveston and Harris counties gathered at the hurricane evacuation workshop said they didn't share that confidence.
They fear evacuation planners have underestimated the difficulty of moving as many as 360,000 vehicles through the congested and flood-prone Houston area in a Category 5 evacuation.
They were concerned about a little over a third of a million cars? There are over 7 million residents of the region now being evacuated.
But, who could have known people would actually take a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane seriously? Who could have known?
Apparently, Bill King did. Last winter.
Bill King has a vision he can't shake.He sees long lines of vehicles -- family cars with young children in the back, pickups pulling expensive boats, and buses filled with the sick and the old -- trapped in a major traffic jam on Texas 146 or the Gulf Freeway. Behind them, a massive hurricane churns ashore.
Posted by MB Williams at September 23, 2005 10:33 AM