Society

This is tragic and serves as a reminder that the human costs of mass evacuations are not always less than those of hurricanes. Public officials should not treat mandatory evacuation as the safe option when hurricanes approach. Not that officials aren’t usually conscientious. However, post Katrina, “must evacuate” is in danger of becoming the politically safe buzz-meme WRT hurricanes, and it is unwise to assume that evacuation is always the safe option. There are often no safe options.

I find more fault with the press in this regard than I do with politicians. The media have become hysterical in their treatment of hurricane risks. Drudge has been particularly bad.

(A previous post on related topics is here.)

UPDATE: Via Instapundit comes this thoughtful post about evacuations and media hysteria. The author says that for many people in Houston there is no need to evacuate, and that the media, by making no distinction between risky low-lying areas and everywhere else, are panicking people, exacerbating road congestion and making the area-wide situation much worse than it has to be. That’s right. Waves and flooding are the big killers in hurricanes. While people who are near the ocean and in low-lying areas should consider leaving, for people who are already inland and on high ground it may be reasonably safe to weather the storm at home or in a robust larger building.

A&L links to Jonathan Yardley’s review review of Miriam Weinstein’s How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier, and Happier.” He feels she overstates her case, but agrees a powerful case is to be made. This reinforces a point some other writers made that I mentioned in an earlier post. And I see this as we are preparing to go another family celebration in my husband’s large and tightly knit family – one of his twenty-five or so cousins on his mother’s side is celebrating a 25th anniversary. (In the last year we’ve been to a 50th anniversary and a wedding for others of those cousins.)

And I remember the dinners my mother-in-law insisted on making and serving every night of the week for our small family (at first with only one daughter), for the beginning years of my business. I was never home to fix meals during those long days and longer weeks; sometimes I literally fell asleep on my feet. The home would have been chaotic – food ordered, dinners out, snacks grabbed – if it had fallen to me. But she proceeded with an iron will. The family must eat together, eat calmly, eat at the same time, eat a balanced meal. I can’t say it was always easy on me – it wasn’t my food in my house, it wasn’t, in a real sense, my family. But it was, as I came to realize, exactly what my husband and daughters needed: they needed to be able to count on that meal, they needed to be able to count on that quiet. And so my daughters felt relatively secure and our marriage lasted when the external pressures of our separate professional obsessions (and my lost career in English) strained it. My husband and daughter (and therefore, I) needed that space, that ritual, that predictability. And now, my mother-in-law is 87 and wants to go to this anniversary dinner because it, too, is a ritual and even more important to her as her siblings age and there are fewer of them to observe it. Barbecue and kolaches and polkas – it is a rowdy ritual but no less meaningful for that.

A. Scott Crawford made some good points in his comment on Shannon’s “Critical Failure” post. A lot of commentators seem to assume that governments can just order people to leave and that they will do it. A lot of them will — almost everyone in New Orleans left — but some will not, no matter what the govt does. Even if the NO municipality or LA state govt had provided transportation out of town, some people would have stayed. In hindsight, evacuation looks like the obvious choice, but before the storm arrives you can’t know. There have been plenty of false alarms in the past, and evacuation is costly.

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Here’s a history of one of the most versatile tools ever.

UPDATE: The history of duct tape!

Whoa.