i believe 26 died during Alicia, as well. Alicia spun of tornadoes like crazy...one knocked the roof of my home..allowing substantial rainfall, and we lived in a hotel for 7 weeks.
The media scared Houston into a frenzy. I believe about Thursday those who are educated in the sciences and Physics of the Earth knew the hurricane knew it was not going to harm Houston. Don't let the media hype get to you.
Sorry but that is total bull****. It was but by the slightest meteorlogical chance that this was not a major, major catastrophy for this city. You could have had a roomfull of supercomuters runnining billions of simualtions of the known factors and you could not have been sure enough that the hurricane was going to turn or weaken that you could have not taken the precautions taken. Weather has to many unknowns.
Dude, no one, not even meteorologists "knew" what was going to happen Wednesday. Even Friday, they only knew what was "likely" to happen, but they couldn't even exactly pinpoint where the landfall was going to take place.
He's talking about the bus fire most likely. We all know that the bus only caught on fire because it was being used to evacuate people.
no offense...but that is easily the stupidest statement i've ever read here. hurricanes turn quickly..they wobble this way and that. katrina turned at the last minute changing her course. alicia turned and hit houston despite predictions she would hit louisiana. to pretend that you knew where this storm was going...and that everyone else is uneducated and didn't...is condescending and based in nothing but your own delusions.
and even then the strike probabilities were only different by 1-2%. so like a 29% chance it hits where it hits..and a 27% chance it hits galveston.
well, even then he's wrong. jasper got the crap kicked out of it...and it's about 50-60 miles inland, i believe. my guess is he's never lived through a hurricane here or anywhere else before.
I can sum up this Hurricane and any other coming remotely close to us: Better Safe then Sorry The evacuation was effed up but at least people were proactive and not burying their heads in the sand and hoping for the best.
The beginning of the article... GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) - The evacuation of the U.S. Gulf Coast turned deadly on Friday when a bus carrying elderly people fleeing Hurricane Rita caught fire on a Texas highway, killing at least 20 along a major escape route, local officials and news reports said.
So, you believe that the evacuation shouldn't have taken place because those people died? To me, if one argues that those in Houston who evacuated when it looked like a cat 4 or 5 storm was going to make a direct hit were dumb to evacuate because it didn't hit, then one has to call those who called for mandatory evacuations in those areas that didn't see any significant damage stupid as well. And then one sees what a dumb argument it is.
real shady -- people died in nursing homes in NOLA during Katrina. they didn't want a repeat performance of that. as i understand it...the brakes were the problem. made worse by oxygen tanks used by those on-board. there was not a mandatory evacuation for those people...they just thought it best to get out.
Think what you want MadMax. I studied those visible loops and even my professors explained to us that the hurricane was moving east-northeast because of the natural rotations of the Earth. On Thursday it looked likely that it was going to hit about 100 miles east of Houston. I never said it was 100% but what I thought turned out right. In addition, the National Hurricane Center said the hurricane would not stay as a category 5. It would be category 3-4 borderline at landfall at worst. The media scared everyone when they said "this is the 3rd strongest hurricane EVER." Yet it was still nowhere close to landfall at that point. In the end we are all ok, let's be thankful.
I'm fine with the evacuation. I was merely making a point earlier that the 22-26 people who died during Alicia and Allison was not catastrophic. While a loss of life is always sad, a mass evacuation caused roughly the same amount death as these storms that hit Houston did.