Evacuating On Vacation
(Fort Bend County)
We were supposed to fly to Ohio to visit my family, out of Houston Hobby Airport late Thursday afternnoon.
That seemed like a dicey undertaking with more than a million people fleeing in the opposite direction. And at the time, Hurricane Rita appeared to be headed straight for Houston, so the idea of leaving one of our vehicles to be lashed by the storm appeared unwise, to say the least.
I was able to get our flight switched to Austin’s airport on U.S. 71, normally a 2.5-hour drive from Richmond. The flight was to depart Thursday at 8:15 a.m. At first I thought we’d be OK if we left very early in the morning, say 2.
But traffic was already getting heavy, so instead, we left at 7:45 Wednesday evening. I’d hoped U.S. 90 west out of Rosenberg would have less traffic than State Highway 36, but in the end it was all the same. By the time we got 10 miles down the road near the little town of East Bernard, traffic ground to a halt.
We sat in one spot for anywhere from a half-hour to 90 minutes. Then, traffic would surge ahead for one, two or three miles. Then we’d grind to a halt again. We went a total of 35 miles in four hours. During the lulls, we studied an atlas and found a route through the back roads that would take us to F.M. 102, which went north across Interstate 10 to Columbus.
But the entrance to the country-road route was still a few miles ahead – an eternity, it seemed. Finally, we made a dash along the shoulder of the highway, zipped right onto the proper back road and got into Eagle Lake where we quickly picked up 102. We were lucky to avoid crossing the totally jammed I-10 on 90, which was a huge parking lot by then.
Instead, we were able to catch U.S. 71 and head up to the airport. Traffic was heavier than usual, but moving fast. We reached the airport by 4 a.m.
It’s been eerie watching TV as Rita rolls ashore. When we left town, it was a huge Category 5 storm heading straight for Fort Bend County. Last night it was apparent the storm was weakening and pushing east near the Texas-Louisiana border.
I felt relief tinged with guilt for essentially wishing the storm on someone else. Relatives told us Richmond still had power as of this morning, and winds were around 40 miles per hour.
That’s plenty hard enough to blow limbs down out of the huge pecan trees ringing our house, however, and we still don’t know if the roof held.
Update: The roof is swell. One big pecan limb in the backyard, which I will cut up and use to smoke babyback ribs and chicken next summer, and that appears to be the extent of the damages.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 24, 2005, 09 11 am
