Post-Disaster Travel Safety Tips

The impetus for this post comes from my work life. A tale of warning, if you will.




Vehicle wake on a flooded road. Image credit: Reid Fiest / Global News

These events occurred after Hurricane Harvey devastated the Texas Gulf Coast and caused disastrous flooding in Houston, East Texas, and Southwestern Louisiana.

An employee worked at his regularly assigned location, in the Lafayette area, through the duration of the storm. His family, luckily, were safe from any of the hazards that plagued so many in the Houston area.

Once the storm passed, his crew rotation was finished, so he wanted to go home to be with his family. It was strongly recommended that he plot a northern route up I-49 with guidance from the Texas Dept. of Transportation and the Louisiana Dept. of Transportation and Development websites to track road closures. He is assumed to have complied with that request, but appeared to mainly rely on WAZE, the crowd-sourced navigation app, to route his trip. (More on this later.) His route involved going south from Lake Charles to cross the Sabine River, then taking various roads north and west to go through Beaumont and then on through Conroe and into Spring, Tx, where he resides.

On one particular road, he found traffic was only able to go in one direction and the other side of the road was a boat lane. Yes, it was underwater and actually being used by boats.

He was able to make it through Beaumont, but eventually he arrived at a point on the road he was traveling that was underwater in both directions. I was notified that he had come to a section that his car could not pass through. (More on this later, too.) He then decided that according to what he could tell, he could take back roads and get to I-10 in Orange, Tx, then he should have a straight shot with open roads back to Lafayette.

That plan wound up not working either as he again encountered flooded roads that his car could not pass over, so he was stuck. In an evacuated Bridge City, Tx.

Luckily, he knew someone who lived in nearby Orange, Tx. who had not evacuated and was able to come pick him up. He was able to stay with this friend for the next day or so until waters went down and he could then make it back to Lafayette and on to Spring via a northerly route.

There are two take-aways I want to focus on from this experience, detailed below.

1. A crowd-sourced traffic/hazard/navigation app relies on having a crowd available at a specific location to report hazards and road closures. In this case, I suspect it showed no traffic issues because there was no one telling it that there were issues on the selected route.

2. When planning to take a potentially risky route through an area that is experiencing flooding, DO NOT attempt to take said route in a car! Unless it is lifted and riding on large tires, you most likely will not make it.

Some other points I would like to add is be prepared to sit tight when traveling in this kind of situation. Make sure to have water, food, medication, cash, a blanket, and anything else you might need in the event you are stranded and unable to travel further.

Please let me know your thoughts on this post and any suggestions for staying safe in this type of situation.

RE: Regulating the Cajun Navy

It's really funny(not funny) how some people will go to extremes to restrict liberty with the intention of making things easier/better.

We had a lot of people helped by "the Cajun Navy" during the flooding of 2016 in Louisiana. In case you are not familiar with the term, it was used to describe the unorganized group of civilians with personal boats who took to the flooded areas to rescue people stranded in their homes. Supposedly, some officials claimed to not want the civilians' help due to perceived liability. That did not stop the Cajun Navy from helping.

Now, Jonathan Perry, a politician from Kaplan is proposing legislation that would require anyone wanting to participate in rescue operations, similar to what the Cajun Navy did during the floods, would have to be trained, licensed, and have continuing education in those areas, at their own expense!

It seems to me that the result would be less people would want to participate just due to the hassle involved.

Mr. Perry posted a video explaining his reasoning. I have not watched it, but I cannot imagine any reasoning that would make me agree with it.

Usually when regulation is enacted, it is veiled as "for some group's safety"...when in reality, it actually is protecting or enabling another group or entity an upper hand. What are the possibilities here? Maybe someone has a rescue service and wants to be able to say all of our teams are certified...or maybe somebody has an interest in providing the training required by the regulation.

I don't know that either of these scenarios apply to the situation, but it begs the question "What is the real driver?

The other possibility is that Mr. Perry just doesn't realize that this type of regulation will almost guarantee that people will either not participate next time or will be breaking the law to rescue people. Does he really want that to happen?

Probably the best idea I have heard so far is from MACAOIDH (Scott McKay) over at The Hayride:

"If Perry really wants to promote the Cajun Navy and increase its access to disaster areas, there’s a good answer here which doesn’t involve state law at all. What we need isn’t legislation but rather a festival. If you want to keep the bureaucrats and the law enforcement control freaks from interfering with, as Dustin put it, people helping people, then let’s make the Cajun Navy a cultural phenomenon and let’s have an annual celebration of their heroism over a weekend in the middle of August every year. Let’s have it at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center or someplace similar, let’s have Bass Pro or Cabela’s bid to be the corporate sponsor of it, let’s have boat rescue safety courses or a seminar as part of the program along with chanky-chank music and jambalaya and beer and baby alligators or whatever else you want and let’s have the Cajun Navy get recognized annually as embodying our tradition of great citizenship and voluntarism."

You can read the whole article here: http://thehayride.com/2016/08/johnathan-perry-goes-to-video-explaining-his-cajun-navy-certification-idea-and-well/#ixzz4IGg8kCPq

7 Signs We Are Heading for a Mass Extinction?

7 Signs We Are Heading for a Mass Extinction

So what I want to know is if this has been building up for a while (ref. Part about extinction of megafauna), and the climate change we are experiencing is not entirely the fault of human activity, how can we avert a Mass Extinction? I am all for conservation and preserving/repairing the environment where we can, I don't see how we can impact this natural process enough to change this trend.