Goodbye, Dean

In the end, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.

As of Wednesday night, the system was downgraded to a tropical depression. There were no deaths reported in Mexico nor known damage to its vital oil infrastructure, but a threat of inland floods and mudslides still loomed.

"There was a lot of preparation, a lot of planning, so we avoided human losses," said Juan Manuel Orozco, the state's police chief, after surveying the region.

Dean, whose impressive girth swirled clouds into the Pacific Ocean by afternoon, was a tropical storm before dusk and was expected to begin breaking apart over the central Mexican mountains overnight.

It was a much tamer storm than many had expected, and the farmers, villagers and fishermen here took it in stride. Even at the height of the hurricane, people walked the streets in Martinez de la Torre, a market town 25 miles inland where shops selling everything from tortillas to clothing remained open.

Within a few hours of the storm center's passing, electricity was on in many of the bigger towns and crews from the federal power company were working on lines.

"Despite the fury of this hurricane, up till now we've got off easy, and we've got off easy because we were prepared," Mexican President Felipe Calderon said while surveying the Yucatán Peninsula, where Dean first struck the country Tuesday with 165 mph winds.

We should all be thankful for that. As we know from recent history, it doesn't have to be like this.

Speaking of which, here's one for the Nobody's Ever Satisfied chronicles.

One Bexar County commissioner is saying the state went way overboard with preparations, and wasted some serious money on a storm that didn't impact Texas.

County Commissioner Lyle Larson says the state wasted millions of dollars despite knowing Hurricane Dean was not headed our way.

"We had aircraft sitting at the tune of $10,000 a day out at Kelly AFB, just in the event they needed to be deployed," Larson said.

[...]

[W]ith millions of dollars spent on mobilizing aircraft, buses, ambulances and the Texas National Guard, did Texas overreact?

"The problem is, you do this two or three times, then people are gonna say, 'Do you really need us?' There's gonna be ... complacency's gonna take place," Larson said.

Throughout the preparations, San Antonio officials said it was better to be safe than sorry.

"If we just said, 'It's not going to hit us,' and turned around, and dropped our arms, and sent people home, we wouldn't be as prepared if it does take a turn," said Nim Kidd, the city's emergency management coordinator.

"There'll never be another opportunity like this. Because, even if this one doesn't hit us, the next one might," Mayor Phil Hardberger said.

Still, Larson said we continued to bring in resources late in the game, knowing Dean wasn't going to have an impact on Texas, and that the lesson to be learned here is efficiency.

"We just need to have a schedule, a time schedule, of how long it will take to them get here, a commitment of the resource, and then have a virtual exercise. You don't have to actually bring them down and physically have them in place, and send them to South Texas, knowing they're not gonna be needed," Larson said.

In the abstract, Commissioner Larson has a valid point. In the here and now, I suspect this is mostly a matter of risk assessment and where one chooses to draw the line between "we could still get hit" and "we're probably not going to get hit". I don't think it's a big surprise to anyone that less than two years after Rita, a Cat 5 storm in the Gulf is going to have just about everyone leaning towards doing too much rather than too little. I won't condemn anyone for that.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 23, 2007 to Hurricane Katrina