And another problem too is where are those people going to go? I was reading an article from the BBC where they were talking to people in Rockport, and one woman said she didn't have family anywhere else and didn't have any money. When that's the case, where are you going to go? I guess you could decide to just hit the road and figure the rest out later, but I have a hard time faulting her in that situation.
I can't remember exactly, but I think only half of the Katrina people who left NO returned back home after a year. They scattered all over the US. FEMA just put them on buses and shipped them to other cities and basically told them good luck. Lack of affordable housing was a problem, so most will probably end up in larger cities like Chicago, NYC, LA, etc. But you can assume with the number of people being displaced in Houston, they will scatter to nearly every state.
IIRC Rita came shortly after Katrina, and where Katrina made landfall at NO and rolled west along the coast toward Houston, Rita hit Houston dead on.
I think the problem here was time. Given enough time you can move the people (I think there's something like 2.4 million in Houston proper, closer to 6 with the whole metro). The logistics are staggering, would require a huge amount of manpower, clear communications between all groups, etc. Incident Command Structure (ICS) is how it's done, but time was the enemy here.
