The Spirit Realm

Big difference between trying to get out like this, Bubba, and people who just decided to stay -- of which there were plenty AGAIN, even in New Orleans.

I live and work in Houston, as an ER nurse, at a hospital that lies along the I-10 corridor. We had at least 12 heat related emergencies on thursday related to the gridlock, and 2 deaths out of those. It was chaotic, disorganized, and a general cluster in retrospect, seeing as our worst problem was power outages due to the high winds. I waited 1 hour and 45 minutes for gas at the one station I found in a 5 miles radius. It was sick. And today there have been traffic jams of people trying to get back in to a town with 600,000 power outages and no gasoline. Stay away! I would if I wasn't locked in the hospital for the last 3 days.Been a strange experience for sure. People are parking at gas stations waiting for them to open up or get gasoline. Today they were pulling guns on eachother to skip the gas lines.

We don't have to run these natural disasters through the bipartisan political spin filter to make sense of them. All levels of government failed the victims here. And the main point illustrated in the Katrina example is that there was a good chance you were screwed reagrdless of whether you wanted to leave or not or whether you were hoping to be saved by the government or not.

Millions of people on too few roads with too little gas in Texas = problems evacuating.

Millions of people on even fewer roads with too little gas (or no cars) in LA = worse problems evacuating.

No one is saying there weren't people with questionable decision makeing skills who stayed behind in both cases, but Jagged you and Sudancia said the vast majority of people who stayed behind in LA could have left if they wanted to and therefor were not victims. The Texas example demonstrated very clearly that wasn't the case.