Two words for those who're flinging shade at Houston municipal officials: Hurricane Rita

[Lee-Lee]

65. "Well we screwed it up before so why try" isn't a strong policy base

It's not one at all, in fact.

If your last try at evacuation more than a decade before failed and your new policy "well just screw trying to evacuate" then that's just as big a failure.

The right answer isn't to say it's hard so screw even trying. The right answer is to set up better policies to have a more orderly evacuation.

You set priorities by determining the most at risk places and evacuating them first and early. Instead of waiting and telling everyone to go at once you set a phased evacuation to get only the people who need to leave most out, in timed phases, so not everybody is on the road and everybody that is isn't on it at once. Mandatory, nobodystays in areas after the deadline and deadlines and phased.

You use your flood mapping to determine the most at risk areas and your traffic planning maps to find the hardest to leave areas and they get emptied first.

You look at what caused the failures last time- broken down vehicles, out of gas, etc that bottlenecked traffic. You take the crews that drive the fuel trucks for the school buses and other municipal activities and have them going up and down filling those out of gas. National Gurd fuel tankers can be used here, all they need is the right sized nozzle for unleaded tanks. You contract with wrecker services to be stationed every mile along the route to quickly drag broken cars out of the travel lanes. You have relief agencies along the route with food and water.

It is possible to have an evacuation plan that works. To just throw up your hands and say "screw it, why bother trying" is a leadership failure. Not a new one, this should have stared right after the lessons learned of Rita.