Houstonians should be less eager to evacuate

Happy June, everyone. Today is the first day of hurricane season, which might bring back some bad memories for some of you. But next time a hurricane's headed our way, the Chronicle reports that most of us shouldn't be so quick to blow this popsicle stand.

During Rita, about 40% of households outside of the designated evacuation zones tried to leave Houston. Many residents who lived closer to the coast had an unnecessarily difficult time getting out of town due to the gridlock created by the huge numbers of people on our freeways. Michael Lindell, Director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at A&M warned against repeating this:

There are some mandatory (evacuation) areas down in the southeast and over towards Baytown. But that's nowhere near 40 percent of Harris County. Nobody inside of Loop 610 was at risk. Nobody west of I-45 should have been leaving or north of I-10.

Houstonians were understandably skittish during Rita, since they had just witnessed the destruction that Katrina wrought on New Orleans. However, officials say that if you live in a sturdy dwelling that is not in an evacuation zone, you should probably not evacuate. After Rita, Lindell and his staff learned that many people didn't even know whether they lived in an evacuation zone, and maps of the evacuation zones were too confusing. Now, the city has put together a simpler ZIP code-based evacuation plan. Check it out and stay informed during severe weather situations to help avoid the problems created during 2005's evauation.

In a related story, Galveston was named one of the five US cities most vulnerable to a strong hurricane as we head into a hurricane season in which researchers have predicted we'll see 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense.