Many of you have been following the news and know that Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Gulf Coast where we live. So far we are surviving well. We have not lost power and our town has suffered a little damage due to the wind, but not near what other Gulf Coast Texas towns have gone through.
Currently, our county has major flooding. We live about a quarter mile from the Colorado River. We are between it and the San Bernard River. Both are expected to flood in unprecedented amounts.
People who don't live in a place like this don't understand why people don't just leave their homes and choose to shelter in place. There are several reasons. One reason is that it is too expensive to evacuate. And, if one does evacuate along with everyone else, where can you go? We evacuated with Hurricane Rita and found ourselves having to go all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma to find a place we could stop. Once we got there, we had to find a motel room for about a week and pay for food.
Harvey has devastated towns to both the west and east of us. Our youngest daughter lives in Corpus Christi. She and friends evacuated together. We don't know yet what she is going to find when she gets back.
Most shelters will not allow you to bring pets. Our daughter has a cat. Our other daughter has a dog. There are few shelters that will allow animals.
We need to change that.
We also need to take what we learn from each natural disaster and apply what we learn to be ready for the next one.
The first thing is that all utility lines that can be buried, must be buried. This is just common sense. If crews only have to deal with those lines that could not be buried, power could be restored quickly.
Those who can afford a back up generator should buy one. Power companies should have each neighborhood on its own backup generator so that life essential electricity remains on as much as possible.
Another reason people shelter in place is because sometimes the evacuation is more dangerous than the storm. If we could somehow make it safer to evacuate, then maybe more would do so. We could widen all roads that would be used in an evacuation and put signals and signs along those roads that would allow for an orderly conversion to contraflow.
Contraflow means that the traffic patterns are reversed. Most inbound lanes are reversed to increase the number of outbound lanes. You have seen the big red Xs and green arrows over lanes that indicate the direction of traffic flow. These should be used extensively. Also, all four way stops need to be replaced with traffic signals. This would free up much needed manpower. Rather than have some police officer direct traffic, the signals could do so.
Rest areas should have emergency fuel at them so that in an evacuation evacuees could fuel up free along the way.
Price gouging should incur a 30 year sentence that would require all who are found guilty to actually serve the 30 years, either behind bars or performing community service.
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