Friday, September 23, 2005

Texas: Big and dumb

From the Houston Chronicle:
Jack Colley, coordinator of the state emergency operations center, said the state evacuation plan included getting fuel to stranded motorists, but that the number of people coming out of Houston was a surprise.

"The number of people, the amount of cars, the amount of compliance with this (evacuation order), there's some things you can predict and some things you can't, that are unpredictable," Colley said. "We are compensating. They may run out of gas, but we're going to get them gas."

Colley said it is too early to tell if mistakes were made in the planning and execution of the evacuation.

Yeah, the fact the people would leave after a mandatory evacuation just weeks after a hurricane demolished the city of New Orleans must be so hard to predict.

BTW, if there is ever a mandatory evacuation of Long Island, I am so freaking dead. You can sit at the bridges and tunnels for hours with just ordinary traffic.

6 comments:

Ben O. said...

The footage of those roads is scarier than the hurricane at times.

Traffic, traffic, traffic.

Ben O.

Anonymous said...

long island is still there?

damn, i saw a documentary on hbo that showed it getting hit by a big tidal wave and then frozen stiffer than a swanson tv dinner...

Anonymous said...

PS

texas may be dumb, but they ain't near as dumb as looziana....

where they have known for at least 40 years that new orleans would flood if hit by a hurricane....

and where state officials said...

"we had no idea it would flood..."

Bix said...

I heard one buffoonish federal official say almost that same thing, Jay:

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Anonymous said...

they were all saying it as that is their means of explaining their royal fuck up...

the city of new orleans website goes into great detail about how they will evacuate everyone....

except they didn't...

and the state had no plan...

kathleen pondered for days what to do.....what to do....

everybody down here is dirt poor and dirt dumb and looks to the feds to do everything...

Grammarian@mindspring.com said...

Kathleen didn't ponder for days on what to do. She asked for federal help immediately, and the response was incompetent. That's because FEMA had been gutted in service of the selfish idea that actually helping people might cause Bush and his super-wealthy cronies some cash. Instead, he puts billions of dollars on credit cards and demands that poor people pay ever-rising shares of this debt.

More and more people down there are poor because more and more people in America are becoming poor during the Bush administration. They continually destroy people's chances of getting good jobs to save their own money and power.

And calling them dumb is bullshit. They're your countrymen, every bit as good as you. In fact, going by the evidence of your postings, I'm a lot prouder to have them as my countrymen than you.

Dealing with a disaster the size of Katrina is something only the federal government can do. The people of this country are ready, willing, and able to help out at such times. Even, maybe epsecially, the poor. It's these rich groups who have decided that the very people whose work has made them rich aren't worth helping, because it might cut into their own power--those are the only people who think the feds are doing too much.