Hurricane Harvey

[Rhondazvous]

In 2011, we had enough warning time for the flood, and the area affected, while very long, was quite narrow.  Folks had time to load up all their stuff and 'head for the hills'.  My farm is high enough we had folks farther out on the Missouri bottoms store farm equipment here.  A friend of ours was going to bring his camper here if water threatened his location, and I had a full camper hook up ready (electricity, sewer and water) but fortunately he was fine where he was.

In Houston, where's the nearby high ground?  Where's the nearby areas not under water or threatening to flood?  Where's the nearby areas able to absorb large numbers of folks displaced by the water?  And they didn't have the lead time we did either.

From what I've seen, those places don't exist in Houston. I'm not sure what I would do if faced with the same situation as Houstonians. I'd like to think I'd get the hell out of Dodge but if I had a 2 story house, I might try to ride it out too.

4 million residents of Houston...anyone without enough $$ to leave quick and look for a hotel inland or a place to stay away from the storm basically had to make a choice in a big hurry between two dystopias - your neighborhood under 10 feet of water or a possibly squalid indoor refugee encampment  evacuation center.

ETA: According to The Houston Chronicle, 107 people died during the mass evacuation craziness of millions in Texas during Hurricane Rita in 2005.
http://www.chron.com/news/hurricanes/art...502590.php

-Teresa

Not much of a choice. I remember when my sister and her husband called to tell me a tornado was 15 minutes from us. "Calm down, Rhonda," my brother in law told me. Nothing makes a person panic more than telling them to calm down.

I was 2 blocks down from the epicenter of the quake the hit the San Fernando Valley in 1994. You really don't know what to do in a situation like that. In both cases, I was alone and had to calm myself and think what to do.