Evacuating On Vacation
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, 08 11 am
What Happens Next Time?
We learned that thousands of hurricane victims have driven to or been bused into Fort Bend County, so we rounded up what we could find that might be of use to people who’d just lost everything.
They held a food drive Friday across from the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Department, so I took the canned goods we’d been storing in case of our own emergency, put them into a foam cooler and drove over to drop them off. Four-year-old Nicky, who wanted to come along for the ride, struggled with the concept.
“Don’t take our food dad!” he said. ”’Cause then we won’t have anything to eat!”
Later, we went through the closets packing up clothing we no longer wore, or kids’ clothes we’d been saving for somebody else’s baby. Amazingly, we found enough to fill eight large trash bags. I loaded up the pickup Friday evening and drove over to the youth center behind one of the churches in downtown Richmond, where we’d heard some evacuees were staying.
When I went in and asked the 10 or so people at the front of the building whether anyone could use clothes and shoes, they fell silent. It seemed as if they were trying to keep it secret that any hurricane victims were there, which I found odd. They directed me to Helping Hands, a charity that regularly collects goods for people in need, and said they had to work through that agency.
Which is fine, however, Helping Hands was closed for the evening and didn’t open until 10 the next morning. I was flying out of town before then. So I got up early and drove around with the clothes trying to get them to a place where they could do some good.
There was a big, new blinking sign along U.S. 90A pointing Hurricane Katrina victims to New Life Ministries, so I followed the arrow behind the storefronts to a big metal building in the middle of what still looked like a cow pasture.
Inside, sorted clothing was laid out on tables. A big worship area stood empty, and at the far end I saw a woman talking on a cell phone, pacing back and forth.
Sandra told me church officials had been up all night working with electricians and plumbers who added on showers to the building, so that it would be acceptable as a place where hurricane victims could stay. She told of people who’d driven here from Louisiana, but were out of gas, food and money. More people had been brought into the county then there were places to stay.
But the church was getting the runaround. They were having to fight the bureaucracy of the big relief agencies, pleading to be allowed to take in people who needed help.
Which, to me, underscores a top-to-bottom problem: No one, at a federal, state or local level, had a plan ready to deal with a true emergency. That’s crystal clear to anyone watching or reading the news coming out of Louisiana and Mississippi.
I wonder if we’ll learn anything from Hurricane Katrina, and I hope so. Because Fort Bend County is maybe 60 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. And while that’s probably far enough to buffer most of the damage a category 3 hurricane would cause, I suspect a category 5 would flatten us like so many pancakes. And while we wouldn’t have to worry about the ocean storm surge, torrential downpour into the Brazos River basin likely would cause the river to rise far above its banks. That could mean some of Rosenberg, most of Richmond and probably my house would be under fast-moving water.
So I became curious about the emergency plan and evacuation routes from Fort Bend County in the event of catastrophy.
I visited the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management’s web site Here is what I found out about the county’s basic emergency plan:
A new Basic Emergency Plan is in development. Please check back frequently, for updates.
I could not find a link anywhere on the site for evacuation routes, so I searched the site and found this:
The evacuation routes, through Fort Bend County, are presently being reviewed and revised by the OEM and DPS. When the updated maps and information are available, they will be placed on this website.
So this is what our county government has come up with in case of emergency: No plan, and no way out.
That, my friends, ain’t good enough.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 04, 2005, 10 36 am
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