Tuesday, August 24, 2021

The Narrative Must Be Served At All Costs!

I keep thinking of the blind panic when people tried to evacuate Houston as Hurricane Rita bore down on us. This was after Katrina and the evacuees who came to Houston, and all the stories about the "horrors" of New Orleans because of that storm, which drove people into panic as Rita, weeks later, threatened to come ashore bigger and larger and worse than Katrina. There was literally a traffic jam from Houston to Dallas, some 450 miles away, as cars turned that route into a parking lot of bumper to bumper traffic. Other routes west, toward Austin and San Antonio, were little better. If memory serves only a few thousand managed to actually escape to shelter (as opposed to getting stuck in impenetrable traffic), and the fatalities included a bus from a nursing home which idled too long outside Dallas and caught fire, killing all the elderly and infirm inside.

Had Rita actually struck with the force it was expected to bring, the slaughter of people stuck in cars could have been massive and horrific.

As it turned out, Rita was barely a rainstorm, much less a windstorm, when it finally came ashore.  Tens of thousands were not evacuated, but the panic and chaos were squarely on local officials who announced the need to evacuate without being specific that people on the coast needed to move inland.  People across the Houston area tried to flee, all at once, a chaos that makes the situation in Kabul seem almost orderly by comparison.  Indeed, the lesson from Rita is for people not on the coastline to merely "hunker down" and shelter-in-place.

Of course, I was home that week, and didn't participate in the evacuation, although I had family who did.  They took over 12 hours to make a three hour drive west, by the way.
Journamalism!

Meanwhile, it’s clear this is a complete clusterfuck:
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