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

[haele]

67. I've been through manditory evacuation drills like that. And through manditory evacuations.

This in a relatively small area where there were under 10K people to evacuate over four reasonably large roads in hilly terrain.
The evacuation drills were for wildfires - where there is less warning in advance than in flood events (unless you get a dam burst)

The drills and the evacuation always ended up a clusterfuck. We were assigned primary and alternate routes out, depending on where the danger was coming from and where the firefighters were stationed. You would typically get 15 minutes to a half hour notice if you were in the danger area, and the county was supposed to give you the warning before you left so that the roads wouldn't become parking lots. You were allowed two vehicles max (even if there were more adults in your residence), and no trailers other than for livestock when you evacuated to minimize traffic.

When we actually had an evacuation (wildfire), the household I was living at ended up sheltering in place, because by the time "our turn" to leave arrived, the roads were already packed with the majority of residents upwind who decided they and "their stuff" - including the jet skis and RVs and major household goods hurriedly thrown into trailers and multiple vehicles coming in as well as out was far more important than following the county's evacuation process that would ensure the most amount of people could get out safely.

The firestorm came within 50 yards of the house - and that's only because we cleared the area around and ran the sprinklers off the well for the hour and a half we were stuck there to get the ground, the house, and surrounding area damp enough not to catch. We lost a few outbuildings, yard equipment, and the fruit trees and makeshift plumaria nursery my friend was starting, and the house was still damaged due to heat, smoke, and the ash falling all over. But we and the critters were all okay. No thanks to the idiots fleeing too early who had to be evacuated earlier from their now burnt-out vehicles that were parked on the main road going out when the fires crossed the road.

Evacuation plans work great on paper. It's the human factor that always screws it up, and local disaster preparedness personnel know when the conditions will allow a smooth evacuation, or when it's better just to have people shelter in place where it could be known that they are there and when they would require assistance that could be sent out for them - instead of being stuck on the road or out in the open en mass when the disaster hits.

Hundreds of people died stuck in their cars on highways in Spain earlier this year trying to evacuate willy-nilly from wildfires.

Haele