September 23, 2005
So far, so good
The tide has not risen above 4 ft at my house. I doubt that we've flooded...yet.
From what I've heard from the friends I've been able to get in touch with, and the news, it sounds like we left Houston at just the right time. Early enough to avoid the gridlock, but late enough to get things in order. We managed to miss the gridlock that so many folks were caught in.
What I find amazing is that at some place the down the road the traffic must have been moving. Why didn't it keep going?
It's no doubt a fascinating study for some kind of engineer and I'm sure someone will write dissertation on it some day. It seems that it went bad at some choke points, and there wasn't enough fuel for people to endure. It would be nice to have the Transtar maps for a lot more of the time in question.
I think we just got very lucky and were able to leave when we were able to. If we had other circumstances, or had been delayed by an hour, it might not have been possible for us to leave, like it apparently was for so many others.
It also raises the fundamental question: Is it possible to evacuate an entire city successfully? I'm not sure it is.
One lesson I've learned: Don't wait for the mandatory evacuation to leave.
Another lesson: We need more refining capacity in this country in other parts of the country. I'm sorry, but California and the west coast needs to have oil wells drilled out there off the coast, assuming there is oil there. We need more refinaries. No new ones have been built for 30 years, and we need to get rid of the huge number of different gasoline formulations. It makes the fuel too scarce.
Things would be so easy if I were king. Yeah. Right.
I think this hurricane season has brought to light some strategic weaknesses this country had with regard to our fuel supply. It needs to be fixed. I wish I had the answers.
Becasue the refining capacity has been hit so hard, I'm positive we will soon be paying over $5.00 per gallon. And that is wrong.
Finally, I think the emergency management in the Houston/Galveston area did as good a job as they could. I will be very angry if people begin to point fingers of blame at the people who had to do this job. I know I didn't suffer much, so maybe I'm not so dissatisfied, but overall, they did their best to warn us and give everyone an option to get out of town. Unfortunately, it came down to the fact that the roads were overwhelmed at evac time. That needs to be fixed. I hope I never have to go through it again, but we may well have to. I do know that next time we will have to leave even earlier to avoid the rush, because that's what everyone else will do if this happens again anytime soon, God forbid.
Posted by Bob at September 23, 2005 10:34 PM