My wife and I were watching the evacuation of Galveston and Houston on television last night and one particular scene struck me as most peculiar. With the magic of a DVR, I backed up the broadcast a few seconds and paused it for my wife to ponder a little longer. "Notice anything wrong?" I asked. She responded, "Yes, there's nobody on the other side of the road."
Here were 4 or more lanes of freeway traffic at a complete standstill on one side of the road while the other side of the road was empty. Nobody... the mayors, the local police, the state police, the governor, the 7-11 guy... nobody seemed aware of the possibility that you could actually go the "wrong" way on a freeway in an emergency. Oh, sure, it would have taken some coordination at the entrances to funnel traffic in properly, and it would have taken coordination down the road a bit to disperse all of that "wrong way" traffic. But literally nobody appeared to consider that instead of endangering thousands of people in a gridlock situation, twice as much traffic could have been accommodated by being a little flexible... breaking the force of habit.
If the ability to form creative solutions is a mark of intelligence, there appeared to be an abundance of dullards running the show in Texas. Sorry, that's a bit harsh. After all, who would have thought that there was a possibility of hundreds of thousands of people that might have to be evacuated from a coastal area because of a hurricane? So it's unreasonable to think that anyone should have been able to foresee traffic gridlock, vehicles running out of gas, people being trapped in high heat and no facilities to help.
Geeez.
