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Traffic task force overlooks coastal counties
Published October 2, 2005
When Gov. Rick Perry on Friday appointed a task force to study the Gulf Coast evacuation for Hurricane Rita, there was one large hole.
The Houston traffic czar made the list.
So did the Arlington police chief.
The former CEO of Shell Oil Company will lead the group that also includes a former Continental Airlines chief executive. A transportation studies professor will be among the people looking for the “why” behind a massive traffic jam that took more lives than the hurricane itself claimed.
It’s an impressive list of successful people who know how to get things done.
So what’s missing?
Unless one of these folks has a vacation home at Surfside Beach, the task force is missing a vital component. It doesn’t include anybody from one of the coastal counties most affected by the obviously fatal flaws of an evacuation plan that wasn’t quite followed.
It doesn’t include anyone from Brazoria County, a county of a quarter of a million people that stands between any hurricane and Houston, and it includes too few people from the coastal area.
Bill King, the former mayor of Kemah, and Karen Sexton, a vice president at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, were the closest Perry came to appointing anyone from this area.
Five of the 11 task force members are from Houston. One is from San Antonio, one from Dallas and one from Arlington.
Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who once represented part of Brazoria County in the state Senate, also was named to the panel.
Additional appointments still might be named, and we urge the governor to appoint more people from the coastal areas.
If this panel is tasked to find out what went wrong last time in an effort to craft a better plan, doesn’t it stand to reason that it should include more representation from people with the most at stake in any evacuation plan?
The people whose lives were in danger from a storm surge — those people who must heed an evacuation order or risk being drowned by a wall of water — must be moved out of harm’s way first.
If this is to be more than an exercise of politics, and it must be, the people working this out must come to the table with enough breadth of knowledge to make wise decisions in the best interest of all who are affected when a mandatory evacuation order comes.
The first to be hit?
Coastal Texas.
There’s no mistaking that a lot of work must be done.
When Hurricane Rita threatened the coast, Brazoria County officials did their best to stick with the plan. But the few evacuation routes identified were not enough. People were blocked from back roads, but not enough law enforcement was on the ground to keep traffic on the main routes moving smoothly.
When it became clear that people who didn’t need to evacuate were clogging the roads, contraflow lanes needed to be open sooner. There is much to be improved, also, when it comes to the number of shelters and the availability of gasoline.
If the best solutions are to be found, the task force requires people with a variety of expertise and people who are keenly aware of the entire area.
It isn’t about jealousy at being left out of the party.
It’s about a sincere wish that the panel succeed at improving a vital evacuation plan that will save lives, not take them.
This editorial was written by Yvonne Mintz, managing editor of The Facts.
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