Give The Governor A Harrumph!

Its starting to look rather like we have another case of a Governor and staff who aren't quite up to the challenges of running a State in an emergency.

This from Knight Ridder:

In the end, about 2.5 million people evacuated from the Texas coast, most of them from the Houston-Galveston area, officials said.

For many who were trapped Wednesday and Thursday on Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas, the questions included why the nearly empty southbound lanes weren't opened sooner to northbound traffic.

The practice, called contraflow, didn't begin until Thursday morning. Traffic on the highway was jammed starting Wednesday.

Randall Dillard of the Texas Department of Transportation said the agency must wait to act until it gets an order from the governor's office.

Gov. Rick Perry said Friday that the decision was made as soon as local officials requested.

He declined to second-guess the timing, saying that when the issue is analyzed later, people will be amazed.

"It will be almost miraculous that this many people were moved out of harm's way," Perry said.

But one highway expert said the delay in converting the freeway to one-way lanes shows that Texas' emergency response officials had only partly thought through their worst-case scenario for evacuating the Houston area.

"They probably didn't have their evacuation plan details in complete shape," said Carlton Robinson, a Maryland-based former director of program planning for the Highway Users Federation. "They had the concept down, but they didn't have the details."

Emergency planners must not have anticipated such a large number of people trying to evacuate at once, Robinson said, or else they would have started contraflow before the highways became impassable.

And, of course, the really big question so far is not the contraflow but why so many people were on the roads who didn't need to be in the first place.

Here's the money quote from Knight Ridder:

Some people also may have been picking up mixed messages from top officials.

While Houston Mayor Bill White was suggesting Thursday that residents who didn't live in low-lying areas should stay in the city, the governor was warning people, "If you're in this storm's path, you need to get gone."

Pass around the bat-n-ball toys and lets have a big "harrumph" for the Governor.