SnapStream Blog

It’s now Saturday morning and it appears the worst of the hurricane has passed in Houston.  Hurricane Rita did us all a favor and veered off to the east as it approached.  It also continued to weaken to a high category 3 as it made its way inland.  Out in Sugar Land, which is on the far southwest side of the Houston sprawl, we didn’t even get rain…just some heavier than normal winds.  To sum up, while there are power outages all over town, there is only some light damage to the east side of town and from what I can tell, virtually no damage to the west side of town as a result of the hurricane placement.  There have been some reports of looting but most of them are being arrested immediately. (Go HPD!)

The major problem right now has mostly to do with moving people around.  First of all, there are people trying to come back into Houston right now even as we speak. Not smart!  The city, state, and federal officials are telling everyone to stay put and NOT come back into town.  Some common sense will tell you that if there was no gas on the way out, there probably isn’t going to be any more gas on the way in either.  If you somehow get stuck without gas in the middle of the emergency response, you are most likely just going to be sitting there for a while.  In addition, the emergency supplies and manpower are needed to respond to power outages and other damage that has occurred.  Remember, Houston didn’t get hit badly, but that just means other coastal areas did.  If eager and premature returnees start clogging the freeways, lives may be put at risk.

The evacuation may not have gone as smoothly as possible, but it definitely was not unwarranted.  We just got lucky at the last minute.  If the hurricane had kept strength and veered west, there would have been a much different story being posted here.  The most interesting thing about this right now is the real-world testing of the quantity of resources, organization, and time it takes to optimize the evacuation and subsequent repopulation of a major city.  Although an entirely separate problem domain from software design, the principle to me remains the same…it’s difficult, if not impossible, to substitute planning for real-world scenario testing and validation.  It’s just as applicable to the major statewide events as it is to the design of media center software.  I’m quite certain that if a big one does hit Houston in the future, we’ll be much better equipped to respond as a result of what happened this week.

At the moment, the current recommendation from authorities is for folks to have Monday and Tuesday off and to wait for word on when to return to Houston.  Even though the storm may be over, people aren’t going to be able to drive to and from work without fuel available, and, frankly, I have no idea when that situation will be resolved.  We’re still learning from this as much as anyone.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 24th, 2005 at 1:12 pm by Administrator and is filed under SnapStream Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.