Evacuation Plans

As you might know, a really big hurricane hit a rather large city head-on rather recently. Then another big hurricane was headed for another big city, but then veered off at the last second, but this still made the news because of the immense traffic jams resulting from people trying to escape. In slow motion. Slower than walking.

I'm guessing that two kinds of signs I saw on the way back from Galveston were in response to these historic events.

First, I noticed several evacuation route signs. These seem odd for two reasons. First, they all point to the bridge to get you off the island, so, uh, duh? It might be helpful for panicked tourists who are driving without any level-headed back-seat drivers. All both of them.

Second, pointing everyone to the same route seems like it might not help. What people really wanted to know were all the nonobvious routes.

Then I saw some signs saying that if the attached lights were flashing, then there was an urgent message available on the displayed radio channel. And shortly after that, at a part of the highway divided by concrete dividers which looked extremely heavy but unattached, there were signs saying that this would be a point where you could switch over to the other side of the highway and go the same direction in the event of an evacuation.

That sounds way, way cool because at that point it would have been ten lanes. (Hush, you folks from Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other big freeway places.) I'm wondering where they're going to get people in the middle of nowhere to move these extremely large dividers and block all the suddenly wrong-way-going entrance ramps. It sounds like there's a plan in place, which is nice.

Except that if you live anywhere on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, there are so many hurricane warnings that it gets quite ridiculous leaving town every single time. When we first moved to Houston (actually, between Houston and Galveston), my Mom tried dragging us off to our aunt and uncle's (north of Dallas) every time. But her co-workers just laughed at her, and she got tired of using up all her vacation time for that. It's nice living in Austin now where you don't have to feel like either an idiot (taking stupid risks) or a sucker several times every year.

I don't know how so many people in New Orleans knew to leave in time. I heard that a lot of people who stayed had stayed because they didn't have transportation, not that they stayed because of weathercasters inadvertently calling "Wolf!" too often.

I remember feeling the same way about the twin towers. A huge percentage of people who were there actually knew to get out. Because of some earlier bombings, a whole bunch of people just had the mindset that if you hear a loud inexplicable noise, it's time to get out of the building, and in this case, they were so right. Other people got phone calls and whatnot.

R. has lived through a tornado yanking the roof off his house when he was a kid and feels that he can hear a tornado coming--and recognize that sound as such--in time to jump into a closet or whatever. I don't think I have any such skills. I have a long history of ignoring inexplicable sounds (except on my car).

My employer has a new system for alerting people to get into a building, which can be handy for bad weather or for when guys are outside, shooting at people. We already had systems for alerting people to get out of buildings, which of course is handy for fires, accidents involving chemicals, etc.

Well, I was just trying to think of a topic that I could finish quickly so I could get to bed, and it's late already anyway, and I no longer know what I'm talking about, so good night!