Another Test Blows In

We're now getting another chance for our government officials to show whether they can protect people under the worst conditions. Of course, everything is a bit different this time.

On the news the other night they put up population totals of Texas cities in the possible path of Hurricane Rita. Before Katrina, that would have come off as crass and sensationalistic. Now, it's an important piece of the pre-hurricane planning. Katrina also has primed people to be extra cautious. The highways out of Houston have been jammed for over a day now as everyone tries to evacuate. There have been tragic side effects to this already. People are turning back from the crowded, gas-depleted roads and returning home in the hope of waiting it out.

Watching the chaos of a failed evacuation, it would be tempting to label this second test a failure. But that's not indicated right now. Even as the highways were completely impassable, officials were still calling for evacuations. It's just something that the roadways were not designed to handle. It's difficult to determine how it could have been better. Ideally, you could have a controlled evacuation, with residents of specific areas moved out at an orderly rate, followed by other areas. But that wouldn't have worked, would it? There's no way that you can evacuate that many people quickly and safely.

If anything, this shows, in part, the limits of what we can accomplish. It simply becomes impossible at some point to completely control the situation. But again, this is a wildly different situation, so far, than Katrina was. In that case, people prepared just the same as they always prepared for a disaster -- some left, others hunkered down. The government failed at various levels in its preparation. It didn't preposition crews and supplies in the area to the extent that it should have. It didn't have a plan to deal with its own worst-case scenario.

With Rita, we can likely expect all of that to be better. But the difference this time is that people are preparing differently. Instead of hunkering down, the vast majority are clearing out. And that's something that our infrastructure can't handle. The fear is that people will remain trapped out on the highways when the hurricane arrives -- no gas, little shelter.

Both Katrina and Rita show the need for two things -- emergency officials must plan for the worst and be prepared to deal with the worst when it arrives, and they must still be flexible enough to deal with situations when they change. The government will hopefully do better with the first part. We'll see if they do better with the second.