Tom Whitehurst Jr.

Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A mandatory evacuation order is a decision fraught with consequences, not only for public safety but also the local economy.

Corpus Christi Mayor Joe McComb urged Thursday that residents evacuate the city voluntarily ahead of Hurricane Harvey — adding that he was "at the threshold" of making the evacuation mandatory.

It's a huge threshold to cross.

Ordering a mandatory evacuation would guarantee a cessation of business and industrial activity that would hurt bottom lines from refineries to mom-and-pop restaurants and retailers.

"This would cause a major, major impact on the way that people do business," County Judge Loyd Neal said Thursday, during McComb's midday announcement. "There's a huge difference when you apply that word."

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Neal and McComb are rare among local elected officials in that they can remember enduring Hurricane Celia in 1970, which caught Corpus Christi by surprise and left it a wreck.

But their fresher memory is of Hurricane Rita in 2005, when storm forecasting was much more sophisticated, a mandatory evacuation was ordered, all business shut down, and those who stayed behind to ride out the hurricane endured bright sunshine and almost no options to spend a dollar after Rita turned north and hit Louisiana.

The Caller-Times didn't publish on newsprint for two days, Sept. 23 and 24, 2005, because of that evacuation order. News reporting and online publishing continued furiously, but the online audience was small back then and the gap in the archives is noticeable.

The takeaway for those who weathered those two days of uneventful weather was that the evacuation order was hasty and unnecessary. That viewpoint was from the safety of hindsight, a luxury McComb and Neal won't have until Harvey has passed.

But that didn't make them any less vulnerable to second-guessing. The predicted storm surge with Harvey has kept growing, which led to the inevitable question: Should they already have ordered a mandatory evacuation?

McComb was confident Thursday that the decision-making was right for the conditions. The predicted storm surge and multiple inches of rain concerned him considerably, not only as a mayor but as a father, father-in-law and grandfather. McComb lost two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law to a freak flash flood in Wimberly in 2015.

He was especially worried that island residents could be stranded by Harvey's predicted heavy rains and storm surge.

"Public safety is the No. 1 driving force," he said. But one problem with the word "mandatory" is that it's limited. Businesses and industries will comply, but it's not enforceable on residents who have decided not to leave their homes.

McComb said that what residents don't see when public officials make announcements is the extensive preparation that went into them, not just in the past few days but for many years.

The same Caller-Times archives that are missing Sept. 23 and 24, 2005, back McComb up. There's a spate of stories about hurricane preparations each year. In 2011, the county approved a re-entry plan for returning from a hurricane evacuation. Last year, public officials conducted an evacuation drill to test the system of documenting as well as transporting evacuees. The system includes ID bracelets with information downloaded from scans of driver's licenses and other types of ID.