HOUSTON—Walter Stegent is 83. Passing up the bus stop, he walks everywhere he goes. He says he’s been through about ten hurricanes and don’t scare him much. But his plan for what he’d do in a hurricane does scare Houston’s emergency planners.

“Go down to a school or a church or something or one of those underground shelters,” he said.

City and county leaders were hopeful last year when they unveiled a campaign to get people to call 211.

The idea was to get people registered for help evacuating before a storm. But response has been tepid.

In Harris County officials hoped they’d have at least 40,000 people signed up by now. Instead, only 3,831 are on the list.

Galveston County was hoping for 6,000, but only 750 people have signed up.

“In the absence of a threat we’re just not seeing the registration that we need,” said Terry Moore with Houston Emergency Management.

If a big hurricane did come to our area, emergency officials are pretty sure that tens of thousands of people would suddenly call 211.

They would probably be able to evacuate them, but it would take a lot longer.

“It doesn’t allow us to set the organization to be efficient that if you had pre registered we could have had,” said Moore.

Hurricane Dolly has helped, say officials.

In fact, they say that registrations have jumped by 1,000 in a week.

But Stegent thinks he’d be just fine. He’ll walk on and stay off the list that was built to keep him safe.