From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CROSS COUNTRY
Car Trouble
Katrina led to a flood; Rita, to a traffic jam.
AUSTIN, Texas--If the lasting image from Hurricane Katrina is water pouring into New Orleans through breaches in the levee system, the lasting image from Hurricane Rita is mile after endless mile of red taillights on the gridlocked roads in and around Houston. This Mother of All Traffic Jams immobilized an estimated two million people who were fleeing from a storm that, before it weakened, was classified as Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale--the third-strongest tropical system ever recorded in the Atlantic basin.
The snarled evacuation was more than the cause of immense frustration for people trapped in traffic for as long as 24 hours. The sobering lesson of Rita is that a mass evacuation of two million is no guarantee of public safety. It represented, in its own way, a breakdown of society reminiscent of New Orleans's Superdome: people urinating and defecating in public view, fistfights in gas lines, sweltering conditions that led to 17 deaths, some in cars whose drivers had turned off the air conditioning in a desperate effort to save gas. Also dead were numerous pets, their bodies left on the side of the road.
The grisly scene foreshadowed one terrifying worst-case scenario: People think they are headed for safety, only to run out of gasoline or be stuck on clogged roadways as the storm approaches and they drown in their own cars. It didn't happen this time--Rita turned to the north, toward the Louisiana-Texas border--but the great Houston gridlock poses a perplexing problem for emergency officials: Does a mass evacuation in anticipation of a major hurricane create a frenzy that dooms any chances of successful operation?
Contributing to the collective panic was the region's heightened awareness of the havoc wrought by hurricanes, present and past. The present was Katrina, many of whose victims had found shelter in Houston, and whose stories were told, day after day, by the local news media. Fearing a repeat of Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, where cars and even houses were barely visible above the surface of the flood waters, people in the Houston-Galveston urban sprawl left no car behind, with many families taking one vehicle per driver and as many possessions as they could fit. As a result, two to three times as many cars joined the flight as officials had anticipated--some of them from low-risk areas on the north and west sides of the city, where residents had nothing to fear from tidal water.
The past was represented by the hurricane that still ranks as the worst natural catastrophe in the history of the United States. Some 105 years before Rita appeared to be heading straight for us, an unnamed storm drew a bull's eye on my home town of Galveston. The island city of 38,000 sat on a sandbar two miles into the Gulf of Mexico. On Sept. 8, 1900, the surge from a Category 4 storm rolled over the city, which, at the time, was the financial capital of Texas and the largest cotton port in the world. When the water receded, 6,000 people were dead, another 10,000 were missing, and only a small fraction of the buildings still stood. (Among the structures that survived, somehow, was the home of Henry and Caroline Kauffman, my great-grandparents.)
In 1900, the science of hurricane forecasting was limited to observing the clouds and the waves and measuring wind and barometric pressure. Hurricanes were part of life on the seashore. Residents built their houses on stilts or pilings so that the storm waters could wash beneath them unimpeded. The only ways off the island were by train or ferry. By the time it was obvious that a major hurricane was closing in, escape was impossible.
Today, with the advantage of satellite images, hurricane-hunting aircraft and sophisticated computer models, we still don't know precisely what a hurricane is going to do. (Rita was originally projected to make landfall almost 100 miles south of Galveston and ended up striking around the same distance north.)
This uncertainty contributes to the volume of traffic in an evacuation. The impulse for any official charged with protecting the public safety is that it is better to be safe than sorry--an impulse reinforced by the fresh memory of the bungling and finger-pointing in New Orleans among local, state and federal officials. You didn't have to be in Galveston or Houston to feel the frenzy; Corpus Chrsti, 200 miles to the south, was under a mandatory evacuation order, lest the storm track suddenly veer in that direction.
The difficult question facing emergency planners is how to arrange for the several hundred thousand people who are most in harm's way to leave, while keeping those who face lesser risks off the escape routes. This task is made more difficult because the Houston-Galveston area is so vulnerable. The coastal plain (not to mention the escape route) is flat, marshy and subject to inundation by storm tides. As is the case in New Orleans, the population is threatened not only by the Gulf of Mexico but also by an inland body of water (Galveston Bay) that is connected to the sea. A 15-foot storm tide can reach 50 miles inland, spilling into the heart of a metropolitan area that is home to roughly three times the population that lived in greater New Orleans before Katrina.
Another catastrophe to worry about now is man-made: When the next killer hurricane arrives, hundreds of thousands of people in high-risk areas, who endured the Rita traffic jam, will have so little faith in the evacuation process that they will choose to ride out the storm in their homes, rather than their cars.
The ultimate question to ask is whether government or individuals should make the decision to evacuate when a Rita-like hurricane approaches. There is no way that government can assure that the people on the roads are the ones who are in the most danger, those from Galveston and the low-lying areas near Galveston Bay. Common sense needs to be restored to the evacuation process, so that people with the greatest risk of danger will make the decision to leave, and those with the least risk will stay off the roads.
Mr. Burka is executive editor of Texas Monthly.
