By Emily Ramshaw
Dallas Morning News
Copyright 2007 The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN, Texas — As Hurricane Dean appeared ready to spare the Texas coast Monday, officials in the state command center gave a barely perceptible sigh of relief -- then continued preparing for the worst.
With about 3,000 manned evacuation buses and relief drivers on standby from San Antonio to Brownsville, the coastal city expected to get the brunt of Texas’ storm damage.
With 80,000 back-up barrels of gas at service stations in the Rio Grande Valley, and 25,000 more on the way.
And with thousands of emergency military forces, hundreds of rescue boats and dozens of search helicopters, gas tankers and evacuation-aid vehicles dispatched along the coast.
This all-hands-on-deck disaster response may turn out to be superfluous, crisis-management workers acknowledged as they watched giant projection screens predicting Dean’s spiral over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
But it’s the only option after Hurricane Katrina, they said -- one of those rare circumstances where the public not only expects, but endorses, emergency trial runs and significant expenditures.
“Texas is as prepared as any state in the nation for a major disaster. Local, state and federal coordination is better than it’s ever been,” Gov. Rick Perry said, speaking to a roomful of state emergency responders at the Texas Department of Public Safety crisis headquarters. “Is Mother Nature going to throw you one high and inside sometimes? Absolutely.”
His press secretary, Robert Black, said the whole Texas operation -- even if it’s a dry run -- will probably cost tens of millions of dollars, and the federal government has vowed to pay most of that. The cost to the state will be about $5 million, he said.
While costly, that price tag isn’t nearly as high as it would be if Texas were ill-prepared and a disastrous storm struck, experts say. And though the public expects state officials to be good stewards of their tax dollars, they say, they remain terrified of a repeat of Katrina’s devastation and loss of life, so they probably won’t complain about a “live fire” exercise that pulls out all the stops.
“Particularly when you’re talking about a storm that’s Category 4, predicted to be a Category 5, there’s no room for error at that point,” said Andrew Sachs, a crisis-management consultant who helped set up the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina. “Despite the cost, no one will complain if you’re there too early with too many resources for a Category 5 storm.”
Though Dean is expected to miss Texas altogether, Jack Colley, chief of the governor’s Division of Emergency Management, said it’s possible for a storm to switch directions once it hits the Gulf of Mexico. If that happened, Dean could wreak havoc on Brownsville and the Valley, with close to 1.2 million residents and miles of flood-prone coastline.
Even if Texas is lucky enough to avoid the hurricane, the low-lying coastal region can expect serious rainfall and flooding, officials said. If nothing else, they said, a close call would prove a valuable test of state and federal capabilities, regardless of the price.
“We try very hard not to be Chicken Little,” Mr. Black said. “The consequences are entirely too great.”
The city of Brownsville has called for voluntary evacuations. And state officials aren’t taking any chances, Mr. Colley said.
Since getting a pre-emptive disaster declaration from President Bush on Saturday, they’ve deployed more than a thousand specially trained search-and-rescue workers to the Valley to ride out the storm.
Shelters are prepared across Central Texas. And all the pieces are in place to begin evacuating residents, if necessary.
The Valley is home to 200,000 people living in unincorporated and poorly-sheltered border colonias, as well as 135,000 elderly or indigent residents who would need help evacuating, said Steve McCraw, the governor’s homeland security adviser.
Staff writer Brendan McKenna in Washington contributed to this report.