October 06, 2005
Rock Me Like A Hurricane: Houstonians give local government thumbs-up after Rita
By Jim Dallas
So the H-Chron did a poll on Rita, and reported it as front page news today.
Two weeks later, I think the most significant finding is that most Houston-area residents are amazingly content with the evacuation routine (some might say debacle). Despite concerns over the availability of gasoline and the adequacy of our roads, the respondants gave the local media an 81 percent approval (excellent-good) rating for the evacuation; a 68 percent approval (excellent-good) rating for local government's handling of the situation, generally; a 76 percent approval rating for Bill White's handling of the situation; a 64 percent approval rating for Judge Eckels' handling of the situation; a 53 percent approval rating for Governor Perry's handling of the situation; and a 68 percent approval rating for Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas's handling of the situation. The poll also suggests that most of those "in-the-know" approved of Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough's response.
On the other hand, FEMA and President Bush both received below-50 percent approval ratings for their responses (although Bush's excellent-good outweighed the fair-poor responses).
The respondants self-identified as 34 percent Republican, 27 percent Democratic, and 19 percent independent. The remaining 20 percent didn't know, didn't care, or wouldn't say. In my opinion, this looks like a fairly representative sample of the Houston-area electorate.
The reported margin of error is +/- 3.9 percent.
Posted by Jim Dallas at October 6, 2005 10:55 AM
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This poll was conducted only with respondents whom they verified had actually evacuated? I'd sure like to know how they verified it. They would be the only ones with whom you could conduct such a poll. They are the ones who were affected by the non-existent evacuation plan that when put into effect consisted of a "hit the road and do so at your own risk" plan. Most of whom ended up in hellish gridlock, some of whom ran out of gas and sat in their cars out in the middle of nowhere with no water in sweltering heat wondering if they were about to get hit with 100 mph winds out there in the middle of nowhere and some of whom lost family members as a result of the absolutely abominable lack of actual planning for the evacuation of a million people. God help us in a terrorist attack. Our elected officials won't. Despite their "approval ratings."
Sounds like Greater Houston Partnership getting more bang for its advertising buck.
If you read the poll through "fair" is not considered positive for the approval rating -- something that can be debated. Only 51 respondents (7.8%) said that the local government did a poor job. There were 351 poll respondents that actually evacuated or attempted to evacuate, so even assuming that every single person who thought the local government did a poor job was in the "evacuated" group, that would only be 14.5% of those who evacuated thinking the local government did a poor job.
This poll shows, as Jim pointed out, that people affected by Hurricane Rita, ultimately, were fine with the way it was handled. There were problems, for sure, and there are things we can do and should do to improve evacuation plans in the future. But if you read the poll, you see that most of the questions are asking what people did (not at approval ratings for government officials) so we can understand what happened and start creating solutions to solve any problems.
We don't need people who just whine about the problems -- we need to work on creating better solutions. This poll is an initiative, in part, to NOT worry about politics and to focus on how to do it better next time -- something I think we can all get behind.
Excuse me but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that you cannot evacuate 1 million people by just telling them to hit the highway. The time for planning is before a disaster hits. Not after.
