There are a lot of talking heads today yammering about how "Houston should have been evacuated," like that's a thing that could reasonably have happened on a useful scale in the available time frame. I heard one commentator on NPR describing the people who evacuated as "the ones who took the weather forecasts seriously." Sir, we ALL took them seriously, but we know some things I think you don't.
This highlights something I know about people who aren't from Texas, that has been evident in the number of Dallas friends being asked if they're flooding: outsiders really have no concept of how large this state is, and even more they have no concept of how large our cities are. The Houston metropolitan area would fill up most of the state of Connecticut, and at 6.5 million people, there are more than 30 states with smaller populations.
Think about that for a moment: getting the population of the entire state of Missouri out of an area the size of Connecticut in 48 hours. You can't travel south (Gulf), southeast (Gulf), or southwest (storm making landfall). You have, at most, five major roads capable of bearing heavy traffic to the cities with the capacity to take in refugees. The two nearest cities with significant evacuee capacity and experience are Austin, around 150 miles away down a lot of four-lane divided state highway, and San Antonio, about 200 miles from downtown on the Interstate. Initiating a mass evacuation on that scale in under two days is just not possible. The laws of math and traffic deny it, even with contraflow. We saw that with Rita, twelve years ago. People sat on the roads for days, out of gas and out of water and out of food. If that storm hadn't hooked at the last minute, tens of thousands of people would have been riding it out in their cars on unsheltered highways.
OK, say the talking heads, including some ignoramus in the Governor's office, then people "should have understood that if they live in a flood plain and they're getting 25 inches of rain maybe they need to evacuate without waiting for a governmental nudge." We're going to do a little exercise called "Plan your evacuation." It goes like this:
1. Do you have a place to go? Friends or family out of the path of the storm, who have room and the ability to take you in for an unknown amount of time? Can you stay there for a couple of weeks at least? Do they have room for your pets?
2. If you don't have friends and family who can take you in, can you find a shelter? Does that shelter have space? Will it be safe for your kids? Do they have room for your pets (most don't)? Are you willing to abandon your pets to the storm if no one has room for them?
3. Do you have a vehicle that will make it to your destination? If you don't own a car (many in large cities don't), who will give you a ride? Is their vehicle in good enough condition to make it? Local government will probably try to arrange buses or other mass transit options, but assume public transportation is full or may stop running at any time during a major storm situation. Bus drivers also have families they want to protect.
4. Do you know what to take? You have, at most, a couple of hours to locate documents, decide what to take, and pack it for travel if you want to get on the roads in time to beat the storm. Important documents, family keepsakes, photo albums, hard drives or portable electronics, jewelry, food and water for the trip, and anything you want to be certain you'll ever see again. What will you pack your belongings in? If you're not taking your own car, can you physically carry everything you're taking? Do you know where your copy of your lease agreement or your mortgage information is? Do you know where the copy of your home or renter's insurance policy is? If those items are electronic, do you have the means to print out copies for when you don't have power to your phone or access to your cloud?
5. Have you taken pictures of all the valuables you can't take, for insurance purposes? You need pictures of the front to show condition and the back for serial numbers, for electronics. You need detailed pictures of your possessions so that insurance will replace them if you lose them all. Anything you can't prove you owned, the insurance company has the right to refuse to replace. How fast can you get those pictures, and where will you store them? On a phone you might lose? In a cloud you might not be able to access?
6. If you're going to a shelter, or to visit a slightly dodgy friend with a roommate you don't trust entirely, do you have a way to hide and secure your personal valuables while you're there? Predators flock to shelters, because they know that people have the entirety of their personal wealth there with them, and usually the means to identity theft wrapped up neatly in folders labeled "Important Documents." Do you know that a shelter may simply give you a square of floor with a cot and a curtain, and you won't be allowed to carry all your possessions with you, if they don't fit in your space?
7. Are you prepared to spend a day or more on the road to your destination? Is your gas tank full right now? Assume gas stations will be of little help along your route; they run out early on, and getting them restocked is a major endeavour for the companies who own them. You'll need to turn off the AC and even the engine at times, to save fuel. It's southeast Texas in August. Imagine that it's over 100 degrees, and more than 90% humidity thanks to the approaching storm. Can your kids and your pets and the elderly neighbor you're taking to safety stand that?
8. How likely is your home itself to flood? This is a trick question. If your home is likely to flood, you probably know it, but the most recent FEMA flood potential designations may not account for the massive concrete-heavy subdivision that went in near you two years ago, or for the failure of a dam or bayou system nearby. Harvey is filling homes with water that have never flooded before. People who thought they were safe are bailing out their living rooms.
9. How prepared are you to wait out the storm if you don't flood? A lot of people can easily weather a few days with no power. They've got camping supplies, or a generator, or just a real can-do prepper spirit. As long as they stay dry, it's just a staycation as the city closes down around them.
10. Do you have a job that you will lose if you can't make it back from an evacuation in a timely manner? It's a horrible truth that a lot of employers will insist that their employees return to work immediately as soon as the roads are passable, and if you're in a shelter in Austin or San Antonio, you may find yourself out of a job when you can't leave your family there to go back to work.
Many people weigh the complications of an evacuation against the likelihood of a flood, think about who will be there to put out their house if it catches fire or to put towels under the doors to keep out small leaks, and decide it's safer to stay.
And many people in Houston remember 2005; a couple million people rattled down through this exercise and got to "safer to evacuate," packed up their lives and hit the road when Rita threatened the Houston metro. All of us who were here in Texas then remember the pictures, of miles upon miles of parked cars on the highways, stopped with engines off to save fuel, people giving up and walking along the side of the road. No food, no water, no bathrooms, no fuel. There were texts from friends and family in transit: "Still on the road. Not moving. No ETA." I remember the National Guard trucks heading out of Austin, on their way to dispense aid in the form of gas and water to stranded motorists. If not for a last-minute course change, Rita might have killed thousands of people trapped along the highways with nowhere safe to run.
Approximately a hundred people did die in that evacuation and there's no official count of how many pets were lost to stress and heat exhaustion. Everyone knows at least one person with an "I was trapped on I-10 for 16 hours and moved less than a mile," horror story.
Houstonians who didn't evacuate aren't stupid, or arrogant, or naive. They didn't have their heads in the sand and they didn't ignore the weather predictions. They're people with a better sense of what's involved in a major evacuation, and what could possibly go wrong, than most of the people in this country. Stop second-guessing their mayor, stop shaking your head at "those people" and mocking them for needing to be plucked off their rooftops by helicopters.
Help them.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Harvey
A mark on the severity of the situation in Texas:
Since I moved here in 2005, I've seen hurricanes in the Gulf, wildfires across the state, tornadoes nearby, a tropical storm that planted herself atop Austin, microbursts, and all manner of flooding. Today, for the first time in all that time, my cell phone carrier texted me that they're waiving all call and text fees until 9/1 so people in the storm's path can communicate without worrying about money. Call family, text friends, ask for help, check in safe. Call 911 from the roof.
I joke about making pie for Hurricane Preparedness and whether wind chimes will make it through the storm, but I'm a couple hundred miles from the real action. I won't flood, we're unlikely to have any property damage. I'm at the edge of a storm that's hundreds of miles wide and covers millions of people. I have friends worried about their flooded cars or water coming into houses. There will be people who can't go in to work but don't get hurricane pay, so they've got to find that money in the budget until MAYBE they get some sort of disaster assistance.
The city of Smithville, about an hour east of here, is performing swift water rescues from houses. Not rivers. Houses. People are being reminded that as they escape rising water, they need to take axes so they can chop through to the roof if need be; people escaping Katrina, you see, were trapped in their flooded attics and drowned.
There's a lot happening, and it's hard to keep track. Midwestern friends, the reports I'm seeing match 1993 flooding, but instead of having weeks of watching creeks and rivers rise, this has all happened with about 48 hours of warning, and they're projected to see the water rise more.
Harvey's projections have been wildly divergent, but right now he's supposed to head out into the Gulf and come back into Houston. This is probably the worst thing that could happen. He will pick up more moisture and then, moving at a glacial pace, drop it all on a city where the storm drains are already full.
By all means, donate to short term resources. Give to the Red Cross to support their shelters, and when the rebuilding starts there will be plenty of organisations helping out.
But...we have to have different conversations too. Conversations about infrastructure, and about people who have no way to evacuate and nowhere to go. Conversations about how we have to either work to slow climate change or work to build cities on the coasts that can withstand it. Conversations about properly funded emergency management, and first response. And conversations about how we can possibly survive the next 20 years if people consistently have to choose between safety today and safety tomorrow, with no chance to simply choose 'safety'.
These are hard conversations, but keep forcing them, keep having them, keep demanding them of your elected officials. This will not stop, this will not go away, and if we just put Harvey into the category of Katrina, of "terrible things but what can you do?" then we're just going to watch more cities drown, and more people die.
Since I moved here in 2005, I've seen hurricanes in the Gulf, wildfires across the state, tornadoes nearby, a tropical storm that planted herself atop Austin, microbursts, and all manner of flooding. Today, for the first time in all that time, my cell phone carrier texted me that they're waiving all call and text fees until 9/1 so people in the storm's path can communicate without worrying about money. Call family, text friends, ask for help, check in safe. Call 911 from the roof.
I joke about making pie for Hurricane Preparedness and whether wind chimes will make it through the storm, but I'm a couple hundred miles from the real action. I won't flood, we're unlikely to have any property damage. I'm at the edge of a storm that's hundreds of miles wide and covers millions of people. I have friends worried about their flooded cars or water coming into houses. There will be people who can't go in to work but don't get hurricane pay, so they've got to find that money in the budget until MAYBE they get some sort of disaster assistance.
The city of Smithville, about an hour east of here, is performing swift water rescues from houses. Not rivers. Houses. People are being reminded that as they escape rising water, they need to take axes so they can chop through to the roof if need be; people escaping Katrina, you see, were trapped in their flooded attics and drowned.
There's a lot happening, and it's hard to keep track. Midwestern friends, the reports I'm seeing match 1993 flooding, but instead of having weeks of watching creeks and rivers rise, this has all happened with about 48 hours of warning, and they're projected to see the water rise more.
Harvey's projections have been wildly divergent, but right now he's supposed to head out into the Gulf and come back into Houston. This is probably the worst thing that could happen. He will pick up more moisture and then, moving at a glacial pace, drop it all on a city where the storm drains are already full.
By all means, donate to short term resources. Give to the Red Cross to support their shelters, and when the rebuilding starts there will be plenty of organisations helping out.
But...we have to have different conversations too. Conversations about infrastructure, and about people who have no way to evacuate and nowhere to go. Conversations about how we have to either work to slow climate change or work to build cities on the coasts that can withstand it. Conversations about properly funded emergency management, and first response. And conversations about how we can possibly survive the next 20 years if people consistently have to choose between safety today and safety tomorrow, with no chance to simply choose 'safety'.
These are hard conversations, but keep forcing them, keep having them, keep demanding them of your elected officials. This will not stop, this will not go away, and if we just put Harvey into the category of Katrina, of "terrible things but what can you do?" then we're just going to watch more cities drown, and more people die.
Monday, August 21, 2017
Questions to Ask Before You Punch a Nazi
There's been tremendous debate of late over whether preemptive violence against neo-Nazis or Klansmen is appropriate and ethical.
On one side, there are those who say that no verbal provocation is ever an acceptable reason for an escalation to force. and on the other side are those who essentially consider going out in public wearing a KKK hood or advocating Nazi ideology as throwing the first punch and rendering yourself fair game.
I'm not here to debate those questions. Each of us must wrestle with our own feelings on action, nonviolence, and escalation. I can't make that decision for you. I'm here to help you decide, once you've accepted that you're comfortable escalating to violence, whether *this particular moment* is a good one for Nazi-punching. You should always assume that violence will lead to reciprocal and escalated violence, because it always might.
So, some things you want to consider before you throw that haymaker:
Are you ready for a fight? Not just "yeah, man, bring it!" Have you ever been in a fight? Have you been punched, kicked, beaten before? Do you know how it feels? Do you understand you could lose teeth, break bones, or end up in the hospital? Do you have insurance? How will you pay for a broken jaw? Can you do your job with a broken jaw or your hand in a cast?
How many people are on the other side of this potential conflict? Are you outnumbered? Significantly? How many of them look like they'd be happy to let their buddy tussle with you himself, and how many of them look like they'd happily jump in and get a piece of the action? Is it possible that one thrown punch or even a shove could turn into a brawling mob? Tip: it is almost always possible.
Can the people around you handle the escalation to violence? Are there kids nearby? Are there disabled or older people who might not be able to get away from a spreading physical confrontation in the area? Are you surrounded by people who have been advocating nonviolence, who may be placed in danger if you start a brawl with the skinheads across the barrier? If you bring violence into a space actively and deliberately inhabited by those who seek nonviolence, you may make them unwilling targets of retaliation for YOUR choices. Many of them are willing to take a boot to the head for justice, but if you choose to start the fight that causes that, then it's little different from you kicking them in the head yourself.
Is the opposition armed? Are they carrying visible knives, sticks, bats, or guns? Are you and those around you ready to engage a group of armed racists? Do you understand that the moment weapons, even improvised weapons, become involved you start increasing the potential for serious injury, death, and felony conviction? Do you accept the risk of serious injury or real jail time, and do those around you consent to that escalation?
Do you have bail money, or an arrangement for bail and legal support? Once punches start getting traded the likelihood of arrest goes up. Be prepared to cool your heels behind bars. Are there cops nearby? Are they wearing riot gear and carrying tear gas? Are you ready to bring tear gas down on everyone around you?
Finally, one of the most important considerations: is choosing violence the act of an ally or an expression of your privilege? If you are or appear white, understand that the PoC in the area will suffer harsher consequences if a gathering turns violent than you will. They are more likely to be arrested, more likely to experience police brutality, more likely to be targeted by the opposition in a free-for-all. The color of your skin is a shield you can extend to those more vulnerable. If you become an epicenter of violence, you strip them of that shield without losing your own protections. Be mindful of what you may draw down upon those you intend to support, especially when the systematic injustice you showed up to fight means, inherently, that you will bear less of the brunt of your choices.
Overall, the choice to meet hate with violence should always be made with a full understanding of the possibilities. We're living in a world where white nationalist terrorists murder protesters with cars and some states are moving to legalise driving into protests. Our opposition is brutal, ruthless, and reactionary. Choose your consequences wisely.
On one side, there are those who say that no verbal provocation is ever an acceptable reason for an escalation to force. and on the other side are those who essentially consider going out in public wearing a KKK hood or advocating Nazi ideology as throwing the first punch and rendering yourself fair game.
I'm not here to debate those questions. Each of us must wrestle with our own feelings on action, nonviolence, and escalation. I can't make that decision for you. I'm here to help you decide, once you've accepted that you're comfortable escalating to violence, whether *this particular moment* is a good one for Nazi-punching. You should always assume that violence will lead to reciprocal and escalated violence, because it always might.
So, some things you want to consider before you throw that haymaker:
Are you ready for a fight? Not just "yeah, man, bring it!" Have you ever been in a fight? Have you been punched, kicked, beaten before? Do you know how it feels? Do you understand you could lose teeth, break bones, or end up in the hospital? Do you have insurance? How will you pay for a broken jaw? Can you do your job with a broken jaw or your hand in a cast?
How many people are on the other side of this potential conflict? Are you outnumbered? Significantly? How many of them look like they'd be happy to let their buddy tussle with you himself, and how many of them look like they'd happily jump in and get a piece of the action? Is it possible that one thrown punch or even a shove could turn into a brawling mob? Tip: it is almost always possible.
Can the people around you handle the escalation to violence? Are there kids nearby? Are there disabled or older people who might not be able to get away from a spreading physical confrontation in the area? Are you surrounded by people who have been advocating nonviolence, who may be placed in danger if you start a brawl with the skinheads across the barrier? If you bring violence into a space actively and deliberately inhabited by those who seek nonviolence, you may make them unwilling targets of retaliation for YOUR choices. Many of them are willing to take a boot to the head for justice, but if you choose to start the fight that causes that, then it's little different from you kicking them in the head yourself.
Is the opposition armed? Are they carrying visible knives, sticks, bats, or guns? Are you and those around you ready to engage a group of armed racists? Do you understand that the moment weapons, even improvised weapons, become involved you start increasing the potential for serious injury, death, and felony conviction? Do you accept the risk of serious injury or real jail time, and do those around you consent to that escalation?
Do you have bail money, or an arrangement for bail and legal support? Once punches start getting traded the likelihood of arrest goes up. Be prepared to cool your heels behind bars. Are there cops nearby? Are they wearing riot gear and carrying tear gas? Are you ready to bring tear gas down on everyone around you?
Finally, one of the most important considerations: is choosing violence the act of an ally or an expression of your privilege? If you are or appear white, understand that the PoC in the area will suffer harsher consequences if a gathering turns violent than you will. They are more likely to be arrested, more likely to experience police brutality, more likely to be targeted by the opposition in a free-for-all. The color of your skin is a shield you can extend to those more vulnerable. If you become an epicenter of violence, you strip them of that shield without losing your own protections. Be mindful of what you may draw down upon those you intend to support, especially when the systematic injustice you showed up to fight means, inherently, that you will bear less of the brunt of your choices.
Overall, the choice to meet hate with violence should always be made with a full understanding of the possibilities. We're living in a world where white nationalist terrorists murder protesters with cars and some states are moving to legalise driving into protests. Our opposition is brutal, ruthless, and reactionary. Choose your consequences wisely.
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