Ike

[mmcirvin]

Are there really 22,000 people still in Galveston, as this article implies?

Why? With Katrina, a large part of the problem was that many people in New Orleans actually couldn't get out; they didn't have cars, and the system to get them evacuated wasn't working, and officials on all levels of government were caught flat-footed by the nature of the disaster even though something like it had been predicted long in advance. Is that the case here, or are these individuals just not getting it?

Part of the blame may lie with the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale; Masters has been stressing that the potential for destruction from Ike's storm surge far exceeds what people expect from a Category 2 storm.

I don't think many people currently realize the magnitude of what's about to go down.

Update: On Making Light, Doctor Science suggests that not all these people may be on the actual island. If most of them aren't then it's just bad journalism.

...I don't know, this story kind of implies they're on the island too.

Comments

CBS News

[notr.livejournal.com]

just showed a bunch of people on the actual island talking about how they've "been through a lot worse." I'd go with the just not getting it part.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

Suspect bad journalism. Nobody ever sold a newspaper with a headline that said hurricanes are a good thing.

That said... Gustav was hyped as well, and underperformed. It behooves the media to shout a little louder this time to remind people of the obvious. très amusant.

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Gustav did horrible damage in parts of Terrebone Parish.

And as of yesterday, electricity was still out in several parts of Baton Rouge from Gustav.

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Probably some of various. Much of the journalistic report is made on the fly by people not too familiar with the place and local conditions, and is more often wildly wrong than acknowledged. (Corrections when made at all tend to be burried on inner pages after the event is off the headlines.)

One factor of people staying is the human tendancy not to have a good natural sense of probabilities. While forcasting has gotten steadily better, one needs to evacuate multiple times when not strictly necessary for every time it really is necessary. (Here in NOLA the tendancy to go with the more recent example rather than probability resulted in a huge evacuation for Gustav, but now many people saying they won't evacuate for the next one.)

Also, evacuations are difficult and expensive. Days before Gustav, hotels were filled up in cities as far from the Gulf Coast as Arkansas and Tennessee. (I was fortunate to book a nice room less than a full day's drive away by doing searches for rooms in non-obvious smaller towns away from major highways.) Some friends who evacuated for Ivan the year before Katrina endured 20 hours in traffic to go the distance that can usually be driven in an hour, and some living on adiquate but thin margins were impovrished by evacuation expenses to the point of having to let their electricity be off for a month.

Learning from the Ivan examples, evacuation in Katrina went much better. The Texas evacuation for Rita the same year was apparently pretty bad, and more people died from evacuation than the storm.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm hearing some mention of that in interviews with people staying... they're terrified of getting stuck in something like the Rita evacuation.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, though this is still a gigantic disaster, it does appear that the storm surge at Galveston was not as high as predicted. That's something.