Lines, lines everywhere
Anyone who happens to be reading this and evaluating whether to return home to Houston, I hope you can feed yourselves and get around for the next several days without access to essential goods and services. The situation in Houston just shows how reliant we are on the food and gas markets to satisfy our insatiable human wants.
The first picture is what happens when only one or two grocery stores are open in a city of 5 million people. Since it's another fuzzy cell phone picture, I'll narrate what's going on.
I was parked across the street from the HEB at Kirkwood and Westheimer. It was the only grocery store I knew of to be open, and since Channel 11 News crews were there, others knew about it, too. What you can see in the foreground is a line of cars waiting to get in the parking lot and find a place to park. This line, for those who know the area, stretched from the store's facade on Westheimer all the way down Kirkwood to the corner at Richmond. That's at least half a mile. There are people standing outside of their cars, because they know they're not going anywhere for a while.
What you can't see is that once people find a spot to park, they get to stand in another line on foot. This one stretches in the same direction, around the side to the back of the store. It's not exactly comfortable out here, either, in the 90-something degree heat. I felt guiltily indulgent riding by in my air conditioned car.
The second picture is of the gas-line-that-wasn't. Since I was down to half a tank, I stopped behind what I thought were very short lines at Kirkwood and Interstate 10. After sitting for a while and noticing that no one seemed to move, I asked the car in front of me what was going on. Apparently, the rumor was that the owner had heard at 3:00 that gas would be there by 5:00. It was now 6:45, and there was still no gas. Their license plates said "Kentucky," but not that it means anything. I'm just sayin'.
There's a conclusion that I have drawn from this whole situation, beginning with Wednesday night's late evacuation: In a crisis, most people don't know how to think creatively.
Instead of focusing on what will help them reach their short-term goals, they get fixated on what they think they're supposed to be doing.
We began our evacuation at 3:30 in the morning, and by just before 5:00 had reached a Kroger store that was about to open. For the fifteen minutes before the store threw open its doors, people waited anxiously. Once they had, the biggest rush of people I've ever seen at that hour flooded the store, practically diving for the water aisle. Right there, in the middle of an upscale Houston suburb (which was, coincidentally, less than two miles from my parents' home, where we would return by the end of that day) was a near-fight over bottled water. A store manger handed people the gallon jugs straight from a pallet that they hadn't bothered to load onto the shelves. I saw a corpulent woman shove the nose of her shopping cart in front of a man who surrendered his spot in line with the realization that there would be enough for him. When we later stopped at a convenience store and waited for gas, I bought bottles of Gatorade, which had gone untouched on the shelves but still hydrate a storm evacuee just as well as water does. There were even shelves in the cooler full of Propel fitness water - which arguably hydrates even better than water - but no one had bothered because it didn't say "Water" on the bottle, it said "Propel." I would even dare say that some to most of these people don't drink much water on a regular basis. It's probably Coke, juice, or even Budweiser lining the shelves of their fridge. However, in this case, the news crews had told them to stock up on water.
Once we were on the road, we made most of our progress (save for a two-mile stretch on 59 north) using back roads. We thought, most of the time, that we may be doing something seriously wrong for heading away from the direction that even the locals seemed to be taking. Most of the time, though, we proved to be right. It is possible in that area to zig and zag along the major highway, even crossing under it at several points, and still end up moving faster than the highways did on that day. Only when we started to run into the major routes for Beaumont evacuees did we run into trouble. I don't know why other people didn't take the back routes. When the traffic moves an average of less than five miles per hour, how much distance did anyone have to lose? I'm convinced that this is another example of the herd-of-sheep mentality wherein people assume that just because everyone else is doing it, then it must be the right thing for them as well.
They don't seem to understand that what's good for one car (to take 59 to get to Arkansas) may not be the best way precisely because everyone else is doing it. In economics, this is called the fallacy of composition. It was even surreal when we were heading back south on 59 toward Houston at over 80 miles an hour, passing tens of thousands of cars just stopped on the road heading north. Fortunately, waiting it out in northwest Houston turned out to be the non-event that the radio media was already saying it would be.
Now, I must say something about the lines at the grocery store as well. What could anyone possibly need that badly? If they are in this side of town, it's presumably because they live here and hadn't evacuated from somewhere else. This side of town has power, and they could easily go home and wait it out. It's not understandable to me that people would pass up several open establishments serving food within the same mile strip on Westheimer, and then stand for hours in a line in the heat. They clearly didn't see that several Walgreens pharmacies, a Sonic drive-in, and even the Fox & Hound Grille and Pub, were open and had food to serve in the form of snacks, fast food, or full meals with beer. People were fixated on needing groceries, and needing them yesterday. What were they going to find in there that couldn't wait until tomorrow, when more places were open? More water?
Gas and food aren't the only things in short supply around here. For some people, there's also an appreciable lack of common sense.
The first picture is what happens when only one or two grocery stores are open in a city of 5 million people. Since it's another fuzzy cell phone picture, I'll narrate what's going on.
I was parked across the street from the HEB at Kirkwood and Westheimer. It was the only grocery store I knew of to be open, and since Channel 11 News crews were there, others knew about it, too. What you can see in the foreground is a line of cars waiting to get in the parking lot and find a place to park. This line, for those who know the area, stretched from the store's facade on Westheimer all the way down Kirkwood to the corner at Richmond. That's at least half a mile. There are people standing outside of their cars, because they know they're not going anywhere for a while.
What you can't see is that once people find a spot to park, they get to stand in another line on foot. This one stretches in the same direction, around the side to the back of the store. It's not exactly comfortable out here, either, in the 90-something degree heat. I felt guiltily indulgent riding by in my air conditioned car.
The second picture is of the gas-line-that-wasn't. Since I was down to half a tank, I stopped behind what I thought were very short lines at Kirkwood and Interstate 10. After sitting for a while and noticing that no one seemed to move, I asked the car in front of me what was going on. Apparently, the rumor was that the owner had heard at 3:00 that gas would be there by 5:00. It was now 6:45, and there was still no gas. Their license plates said "Kentucky," but not that it means anything. I'm just sayin'.There's a conclusion that I have drawn from this whole situation, beginning with Wednesday night's late evacuation: In a crisis, most people don't know how to think creatively.
Instead of focusing on what will help them reach their short-term goals, they get fixated on what they think they're supposed to be doing.
We began our evacuation at 3:30 in the morning, and by just before 5:00 had reached a Kroger store that was about to open. For the fifteen minutes before the store threw open its doors, people waited anxiously. Once they had, the biggest rush of people I've ever seen at that hour flooded the store, practically diving for the water aisle. Right there, in the middle of an upscale Houston suburb (which was, coincidentally, less than two miles from my parents' home, where we would return by the end of that day) was a near-fight over bottled water. A store manger handed people the gallon jugs straight from a pallet that they hadn't bothered to load onto the shelves. I saw a corpulent woman shove the nose of her shopping cart in front of a man who surrendered his spot in line with the realization that there would be enough for him. When we later stopped at a convenience store and waited for gas, I bought bottles of Gatorade, which had gone untouched on the shelves but still hydrate a storm evacuee just as well as water does. There were even shelves in the cooler full of Propel fitness water - which arguably hydrates even better than water - but no one had bothered because it didn't say "Water" on the bottle, it said "Propel." I would even dare say that some to most of these people don't drink much water on a regular basis. It's probably Coke, juice, or even Budweiser lining the shelves of their fridge. However, in this case, the news crews had told them to stock up on water.
Once we were on the road, we made most of our progress (save for a two-mile stretch on 59 north) using back roads. We thought, most of the time, that we may be doing something seriously wrong for heading away from the direction that even the locals seemed to be taking. Most of the time, though, we proved to be right. It is possible in that area to zig and zag along the major highway, even crossing under it at several points, and still end up moving faster than the highways did on that day. Only when we started to run into the major routes for Beaumont evacuees did we run into trouble. I don't know why other people didn't take the back routes. When the traffic moves an average of less than five miles per hour, how much distance did anyone have to lose? I'm convinced that this is another example of the herd-of-sheep mentality wherein people assume that just because everyone else is doing it, then it must be the right thing for them as well.
They don't seem to understand that what's good for one car (to take 59 to get to Arkansas) may not be the best way precisely because everyone else is doing it. In economics, this is called the fallacy of composition. It was even surreal when we were heading back south on 59 toward Houston at over 80 miles an hour, passing tens of thousands of cars just stopped on the road heading north. Fortunately, waiting it out in northwest Houston turned out to be the non-event that the radio media was already saying it would be.
Now, I must say something about the lines at the grocery store as well. What could anyone possibly need that badly? If they are in this side of town, it's presumably because they live here and hadn't evacuated from somewhere else. This side of town has power, and they could easily go home and wait it out. It's not understandable to me that people would pass up several open establishments serving food within the same mile strip on Westheimer, and then stand for hours in a line in the heat. They clearly didn't see that several Walgreens pharmacies, a Sonic drive-in, and even the Fox & Hound Grille and Pub, were open and had food to serve in the form of snacks, fast food, or full meals with beer. People were fixated on needing groceries, and needing them yesterday. What were they going to find in there that couldn't wait until tomorrow, when more places were open? More water?
Gas and food aren't the only things in short supply around here. For some people, there's also an appreciable lack of common sense.
posted by CyndyMW at
8:00 PM
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