That’s a much higher percentage than stayed in New Orleans during Katrina, by all accounts.
JFTR, I’m not actually Pitting the Galveston city manager. I’m Pitting the GOP apologists who blamed the loss of life in NOLA during and after Katrina on Mayor Nagin’s having failed to evacuate everyone. Some of 'em still do. But since there’s no evidence that the evacuation of NOLA was less thorough than that of other cities similarly threatened - and now, here we’ve got a VERY similar case where the evacuation rate apparently was a good deal worse - maybe it’s time to bury that bit of bullshit for good.
They were pretty clear that staying behind was not a good idea. Over the last 25 years since Alicia Houston’s done a lot of public thinking on what would happen if a killer storm came, the consensus always being Galveston’s fucked. If you’re an old man with a death wish I can accept, but the twenty thousand or more people who stayed fucking astounds me.
The news articles I’ve been seeing say that people in Galveston were calling all night asking for help getting out of their flooding homes, but conditions were too dangerous to send rescuers out. What in the world is wrong with people? You’re in the path of a gigantic hurricane, and every single weather report is telling you there will be 15+ feet of water coming to cover your city, and you think “yeah, I’ll just chill in my attic and listen to the rain”.
The rescuers were right in waiting for conditions to get better. They’re going to get crap for it, I’m sure, because people probably died overnight when nobody came to get them to safety. But it was the right decision - you don’t send a rescue crew out in conditions like that to hunt for people.
When is your figure from? Yesterday during the day I heard 60% evacuated and then last night before bed I heard 80%. The city told them that staying was “certain death” so it’s not like they didn’t try.
Well, I think Nagin is a dipshit and handled Katrina poorly, but it had nothing to do with the evacuation.
I think the Galveston City Gov. is acting poorly, too. They did say people who stay face certain death, so I don’t fault them for not warning. I fault them for not making the evacuation mandatory. Get the Nat’l Guard, go door to door and make them leave. Put them on buses at gunpoint if you have to.
As for evacuation rates, in The Unthinkable by Amada Ripley she investigates the behavior of people in disasters like 911 and katrina.
The only statistically significant indicators for whether somebody evacuated or not were age and length of residency. It turns out the older you were or the longer you’ve lived there, the more likely you were to have ridden out a hurricane or two, the more likely you were to remember going through the hassle of evacuating and having it turn out to be no big deal.
Then you were more likely to stay.
Wealth and race were not significant indicators.
Again, I have no problem with Rebublicans giving Nagin a hard time because he’s a dipshit. I find the idea that Republicans were being unfair, kinda laughable. After all, we were hearing how Bush didn’t care about black people, how he bombed the levees, and how Bush made the hurricane by promoting global warming and all the rest of that crap.
I’m in San Antonio after having evacuated from the Clear Lake area. The mayor of Galveston screwed up. She initially called for a voluntary evacuation and said that it was “too late” to make it a mandatory evacuation. Then, 24 hours later, she changed her mind. By then, the folks who stayed may have thought it was too late or didn’t have any place to stay.
So who did we hear this from? Random people on the Internet? Or from someone with cred among Democrats?
You can always find someone who will say any random shit. By this standard, the idea that the Dems might ever be acting unfairly is laughable, because look what Scylla and Shodan and Starving Artist say on the Dope.
What’s so funny about it? If Castro can train sharks to eat the “balseros” why can’t Bush cause hurricanes? We have a long precedent of enterprising heads of state controlling nature to their purposes.
ETA: And more to the point, I don’t think the law allows the authorities to “mandate” evacuation. Calling it mandatory means “Don’t even joke about suing us for not caring about rescuing you or your corpse”. There is no real “or else” to their “evacuate or else”.
You forget that Galveston is in Texas. The residents have guns their own selves. Calling for a mandatory evacuation would only ensure that more people would stay, just out of sheer stubborness.
Anyone too stupid to leave who need to be rescued should be charged the full cost of any rescue efforts made on their behalf. Tax payers should not have to pay for morons.
