WASHINGTON – After 24 hours of clogged highways, stranded drivers and short tempers, major routes around Houston returned almost to normal Friday afternoon, but not before the mammoth, snarled evacuation underscored what many emergency planners already knew: There is virtually no way to evacuate a large U.S. city quickly and smoothly.
State and local officials faced criticism Friday morning after a day and night of gridlocked traffic on all main routes as millions of residents in southeast Texas attempted to flee Hurricane Rita. Highways were littered with families whose vehicles had run out of gas after 15 or more hours on the road in what was described as one of the largest peacetime evacuations in U.S. history.
With many service stations also out of fuel, local officials mobilized to deliver gasoline to those still stranded and pledged quick action to get everyone off the highways to safer territory before Rita’s expected arrival early today. As they sought to complete the evacuation, officials were peppered with questions about whether the congestion could have been avoided.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, R, described traffic during the worst of the evacuation as “excruciatingly slow,” but state officials defended the exodus as an overall success. By late Friday, large areas of Houston appeared virtually empty and the roads were quiet.
The evacuation, however difficult, did result in moving between 2.5 million and 3.5 million people out of the direct path of the hurricane, Texas officials said.
What happened in Houston has implications for other major cities that face either the threat of sudden natural disaster or terrorist attack, a reminder of the limitations of attempting to move huge numbers of people quickly from an urban environment.
Time and geography are the enemies of evacuations, said Richard Falkenrath, former White House deputy homeland security adviser who is now with the Brookings Institution. Texas had plenty of time to move people ahead of the storm, but in the event of a terrorist attack – a radioactive or toxic plume threatening a metropolitan area – there would be little time to get people out of its path.
“That is the hardest of the hard cases, which is that you’ve got to get people out of the downwind plume in less than an hour,” Falkenrath said. “No government in the United States is prepared to do that. It’s just going to be pandemonium.”
The experience in Texas showed the limits of preparation, just as the experience in New Orleans showed the opposite, experts said. In New Orleans, the failure to evacuate quickly led to widespread suffering and avoidable loss of life. In Texas, efforts to move well ahead of the storm revealed a different set of problems that emergency planners will be studying once it has passed.
Officials in Texas and elsewhere blamed the clogged highways on several factors: the size, strength and uncertain landfall of Hurricane Rita at the time the evacuation orders were issued; and fresh images of the devastation along the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina, which may have prompted many more people in Texas to leave their homes and get in their cars.
Others said the size and speed of the exodus simply overwhelmed the highway system. “In Texas, you’ve got 2.7 million people who evacuated,” said Robert Stephan, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security. “That just taxes every transportation asset. I don’t care if you’re the most brilliant leader in the world, there’s no way to anticipate all the branches and sequels to that.”
“A traffic jam doesn’t mean a failure of your evacuation,” said Virginia homeland security adviser George Foresman, whose state evacuated parts of populous Hampton Roads for Hurricane Isabel in September 2003. “There has been sufficient time, based on all the study data, to know that the decisions were made in the right time frame.”
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