Three weeks before the 2005 hurricane season starts to peak, there are tropical disturbances cooking up in the Caribbean and east of the Lesser Antilles.
"I expect two or three more tropical storms will form (by) mid-October," writes meteorologist Jeff Masters in his WunderBlog (
www.weatherunderground.com).
Across the country, however, officials in coastal and noncoastal communities alike are wondering about their own evacuation plans.
Such concerns had already arisen after Katrina flooded New Orleans and trapped tens of thousands who hadn't evacuated or couldn't. So when Rita started building up in the Gulf of Mexico, people paid attention.
But Texas officials expressed confidence that our transportation grid and their evacuation plans would handle an exodus.
Unless a Category 5 storm slams into a large Texas city, said Gov. Rick Perry's spokesman Robert Black, "the state feels pretty good about where we are."
An earlier hurricane preparedness study had detailed 18 specific fixes identified by state and local officials during drills, Black said, including "choke points" that the Texas Department of Transportation was working to clear up.
When Rita was targeting most of the Texas coast, evacuations were ordered from south of Corpus Christi to north of Galveston. And in the heavily populated Galveston-Houston area, the evacuation of about 1 million residents living in low-lying coastal areas was ordered.
But as often happens while memories of disasters are fresh, another 1.5 million to 2 million Houston-area residents joined them in overwhelming the most obvious evacuation routes, like Interstate 45 north and Interstate 10 west.
As hundreds of thousands of vehicles crawled at a snail's pace, they were slowed further as overheated vehicles stalled and many evacuees ran out of fuel.
The state Department of Transportation, it turns out, had no real plan for reversing traffic on inbound lanes to increase outflow, so when this became a critical necessity, transportation officials had to scramble, eventually coming up with a poorly designed "contra-flow" plan that worsened fuel shortages by slowing tanker trucks or preventing them from making deliveries.
Luckily, Rita also slowed before turning east and striking less-densely populated areas. But as soon as the danger to Houston subsided, Houston officials got schools to stay closed a bit longer while state officials began begging evacuees to wait while they came up with a phased-return plan that wouldn't create a second traffic fiasco.
Texas must improve its evacuation routing plans, eliminate the choke points and begin expanding and repairing highways with an eye on how such detours will slow future evacuations. And ways must be found to keep evacuation routes stocked with fuel and other basics.
But we also must educate coastal residents better about who really needs to leave, when and on what roads to avoid hurricanes. The worst congestion was on the most obvious evacuation routes, while alternate corridors continued to flow much more efficiently.
Finally, coastal residents without special needs who live in well-built houses that aren't in flood-or storm-surge-prone areas need to learn that they can stay if they prepare for what they will need. And if they insist on leaving, they need to do so early.
What is needed isn't rocket science, just good planning, by government and the residents.
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