Houston mayor second-guessed on evacuation

Houston’s mayor kept facing questions Tuesday about his decision not to order an evacuation of the notoriously flood-prone city ahead of Harvey’s arrival.

Instead, Mayor Sylvester Turner remained resolute in his advice to residents since the storm made landfall on Friday: hunker down at home.

“I want to say this again, because I guess it’s been missed, but you cannot evacuate 6.5 million people within two days,” Turner said Tuesday, referring to both the city and its surrounding areas. “That would be chaotic. We would be putting people in more harm’s way.”

Experts said evacuating during a hurricane is a complicated decision with major ramifications, and none who spoke to the Associated Press second-guessed Turner.

“They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” said Susan Cutter, the director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

Questions started Friday when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested Houston residents get out while they could. At the time, Harvey was a powerful hurricane hours from landfall about 175 miles to the south near Corpus Christi. But the sprawling storm’s outer bands promised heavy rains for Houston, long susceptible to flooding because of its flat terrain and runaway development that has paved over water-absorbing wetlands.

Hours after Abbott’s remarks, Turner and other local leaders cautioned people to think twice before fleeing.

“The problem with evacuations is, when do you call them?” said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “You don’t want to call an evacuation so early and the storms take a left and hits Galveston.”

A study by the state of South Carolina this year estimated that the time needed to evacuate the Charleston area ahead of a similarly sized hurricane would be 27 to 30 hours at its fastest. Moving people from an inland urban center like Houston — the city alone is about three times larger than Charleston — would require at least 36 to 48 hours, experts said.

Ordering an evacuation, experts said, would’ve come with its own risks, such as highways clogged with motorists caught in severe thunderstorms or, worse, tornadoes.

Turner has repeatedly invoked grim memories of Hurricane Rita in 2005, when problems from an evacuation of 3 million — roughly half of greater Houston — were blamed in many of the more than 100 deaths reported. In the worst incident, 23 nursing home patients were killed when the bus transporting them to North Texas exploded.