Of course, too much dread can be as problematic as too little. Coming less than a month after Katrina, and striking many of the same places, Hurricane Rita hit a profound resonance in the cultural psyche. For a brief period, the worst-case scenario was easy to imagine. Though only 1.25 million people were told to evacuate, 2.5 million did so. A carefully planned evacuation quickly devolved into mass frustration. One-hundred-mile-long traffic jams clogged the freeways around Houston. A spokesman for the State Transportation Department, Mike Cox, told reporters that no one had predicted how many
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