'Unacceptable': Mayor creates evacuation task force

06:26 PM CDT on Friday, September 30, 2005

By Doug Miller / 11 News

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"Unacceptable." That's what Mayor Bill White calls problems for the hundreds of thousands fleeing Houston in advance of Hurricane Rita.

KHOU-TV

Mayor White said the state response was 'inexcusable' during Houston's time of need.

And Friday he announced plans to determine what went wrong during the evacuation.

Elected officials in Houston and Harris County refer to the local Rita evacuation as a success, but clearly there were problems as anyone who spent hours upon hours in slow- or no-moving freeways. It's obvious there were not enough freeways, lanes of gasoline, but how does the city and county a disaster within a disaster doesn't happen again.

At a 2 p.m. news conference, White unveiled a task force to study past and future evacuation plans. Mayor White said, "There was an unacceptable level of traffic in the traffic jams on the freeways. Whenever that many people are leaving the storm ... from the heart of the nation's fourth largest city you're gonna have a lot of traffic and you're gonna have a lot of inconvenience, but there was more than there needed to be."

White said it was "inexcusable" that the state took so long to dispatch emergency supplies and gasoline. He called it unacceptable that the state took so long to open contraflow lanes.

To address those issues, White announced the members of a newly created Task Force on Evacuation, Transportation and Logistics. And he is also soliciting input from the public, which can be filed online at houstontx.gov/rita/.

The board is expected to offer recommendations on how to handle a large-scale evacuation of Houston and the surrounding areas. The group's first meeting will take place in October.

Jack Little, the retired president and CEO of Shell Oil USA, was selected as the chairman. Other members named were:

Jerry Patterson, Texas Land Commission

Dr. Carol Lewis, Director of Transportation Research at TSU and chair of Houston Planning Commission

Bill King, former mayor of Kemah

Theron Bowman, police chief of Arlington

Dr. Karen Sexton, vice president and CEO of hospitals and clinics for UTMB Galveston

Bill Klesse, executive vice president/COO of Valero Energy

Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental

Michael Trevino, senior vice president of Marathon Oil

David Saperstein, former CEO of Metro Media and director of the Mayor Bill White's Office of Mobility

Erle Nye of Dallas, former Chairman and CEO of TXU Corp, Member of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents