It's my opinion that the Houston city government is well prepared for disasters, though mostly because they've underwent several trials by fire. I was really impressed by most of their actions during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike.

When N.O. was hammered by Katrina Houston officals immediately realized that they'd be getting thousands of refugees and sprang into action. They knew the logistics of tracking/moving supplies were going to be a nightmare so the first thing they did was call Walmart and request help from their logistics staff. It was a stroke of genius. Walmart supplied expert logistics people, software, and hardware to organise/move everything and it worked great.

A month later Houston was in the crosshairs of Hurricane Rita. People, having watched the N.O. disater, freaked out and four million people tried evacuating the city. There was some critizism about how that was handled, but most of that I blame on the people themselves. Houston has a well-thought out evacuation plan (run from water, hide from wind) based on your location but people just ran wether they were in a danger zone or not. There was also complaints that "Houston" didn't open up both sides of the freeway soon enough for evacuation. Considering many different county officals, police departments, and heavy equipment involved they actually did it very quickly. More importantly, a state-wide network was set up so that the next time reversing the freeways can be done with one phone call.

You may remember the scenes of gridlocked traffic from people evacuating. Hundreds of people were stranded along the road. The night before the hurricane was supposed to hit buses were sent out to collect all these people and take them to shelters. The city also sent vehicles out to help any infirm/handicapped/elderly people who wanted to be moved to a shelter.

Hurricane Ike knocked Houston power out for days, even weeks in some places. Mistakes were made, but lessons were learned. The main complaints were from people who weren't prepared. Those who were found it to be a big party.

All in all, we may not have the numbers/money New York does, but we are ready to roll with what we do have and we've had some dang good tests of the system. Given the choice I'd rather be in Houston than any other city I know during a disaster.

-Blast