The governor of Texas and Mayor of Houston are facing their own embarassment over the way things happened in that state during and just after Rita. Had Rita passed directly over Houston, the numbers of dead could very well have surpassed those of Katrina because of the numbers of people who were left exposed on the road in the botched evacuation, and the numbers who ended up returning to their homes prior to the hurricane because the tied up traffic prevented them from getting out.

Texas doesn't have any workable evacuation plans for its major cities (and neither do most of the major cities in the US), and considering the amount of money (hundreds of billions of dollars) that have gone to the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11, there's just no excuse.