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It's been explained on the news all weekend.

Good god just shut up.

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Please keep making our tragedy your political fodder.

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Agreed. This is bad form.

He probably remembers the Alamo.

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I missed it.

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Houston mayor explained it pretty well, at least that's how it seemed to me.

I know this because I was thinking to myself "why didn't they evacuate. Oh. mayor is a dem? This outta be good. He should have evacuated, and will now seem like an idiot."

After his explanation... I was thinking "oh.. that makes sense.".

How do you evacuate one of the largerst cities in the nation anyway?

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How do you evacuate one of the largerst cities in the nation anyway?

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Exactly. Traffic would have been at a standstill when the floods came. Can you imagine that scenario?

Our freeways and interstates are elevated.
They're still underwater.

People disproportionately die in cars from floods, so evacuation is not as straightforward a call as it seems. Putting millions of people on the roads at the same time would not only have been a logistical impossibility, it would've created certain death traps.

Houston went that route12 years ago, evacuating for Hurricane Rita (more than 3 million people from south and southeast Texas set off on one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history). Traffic jams stretched across hundreds of miles over two days. Many people ran out of gas. Dozens died from accidents and heat-related illnesses--all before Rita even made landfall.

Mayor Turner:

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“You cannot put, in the city of Houston, millions of people on the road…That is dangerous,” he said in a press conference Sunday. “If you think the situation right now is bad — you give an order to evacuate, you create a nightmare."

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Harris County Judge Emmett:

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“When we have hurricanes, we know who to evacuate, because you have a storm surge coming, and we have that down to a very fine art. In this case, we have a rain event. Unless you know where the rain is going to fall, we don’t know who to evacuate.”

While ordering a hurricane evacuation is common, telling residents to flee a rainstorm is rare, if not unprecedented. “We’ve had three major rain events in the past two years. This is now the fourth," Emmett said.

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Procedures will be reviewed.
Undoubtedly policies will change/be added.
But the city is far from the point of casting blame.
Right now everyone's just trying to rescue those who need help, save the homes of those who are being threatened, and weather this rain that never seems to stop.