Texas - 11,000 potential casualties

People forget, Houston is surrounded by water. They may flood, but at least they aren't a huge bowl like New Orleans. We were just west of Houston for Hurricane Rita and they evacuated (I don't recall if it was mandatory or not) the city of Houston for that small storm. Where I worked was out of power for a week. I don't think the city could handle a large storm. Sounds like the same thing that the city officials were saying her for Gustav. What is kind of scary is that places in Louisiana that didn't get flooding for Gustav are getting flooding for this storm.

Okay, X, I lived in New Orleans for Katrina. Luckily my now husband thought it was a good idea to evacuate, so we did, and boy, was it. Unfortunately, though, not everyone was able to evacuate, even in they wanted to because transportation was not given, and the vast majority of New Orleans' population at the time did not own vehicles because it's very easy to rely on public transportation in that city. Your next question may be, "Well, then why didn't they take a bus?" And I'll tell you that there was poor planning by the Mayor Ray Nagin. Yes, he is a Democrat, but no, I do not always think he does things well. The last hurricane we just recently had was Gustav, hitting right before Ike, and this time Governor Bobby Jindall made sure that there were plenty of busses to ship people out of New Orleans, but the hurricane ended up affecting Baton Rouge, where I live, worse than New Orleans, which made people complain about a mandatory evacuation called for New Orleans. But you know what? In the time of a hurricane, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. The same people complained when Nagin called for a mandatory evacuation for Katrina and stayed but realized that they should have left. I'm not going to pretend that everyone did that, though, because that is a gross generalization, and since I lived there, and my husband and his family is from there, accusations about people's attitudes from there tend to hurt me personally. I know you're not intending this discussion to be toward me, but nonetheless, I'm taking it personally. Thankfully, Ike was not as devastating as they were anticipating it to be, and yes, I do think they should have evacuated anyway, because the people in Galveston should have had no excuse to not be able to leave. I have a friend from Houston who said that people were reasoning that traffic would be too bad to evacuate, but the thing is, the interstates were clear. Why? Because NO ONE LEFT! So, yes, there were others besides the people of New Orleans to blame for the tragic after-math of Katrina (remember, it was not the hurricane that devastated the city but the breach of the levees and therefore, the flooding that occured afterward), but in the case of Ike, if it had been as tragic or worse, those people would have had no one to blame but themselves. Call me biased, call me cold-hearted, I don't care. I am saying what many have been thinking in their heads, people in Texas or elsewhere.

..that and also local government's non cooperating attitude (in the case of Katrina anyway, though of course we know it was all George W's fault.. likely brought Katrina 'imself, 'e did..)

This could be even worse that New Orleans, Houston may go bye bye permamently