Rita - Monday, 9/26/05 - 9:30 AM

The Houston Chronicle has a story this morning about the problems with the evacuation which supports my position that you should stay at home, unless your house will be flooded. The key quote is "Hurricane planners have a little ditty that goes, "run from the water, hide from the wind."". I'm not sure who these "hurricane planners" are (but obviously it's not Dr. Jeff Masters, he of the famous "A huge portion of Texas would be a disaster area." (entry of 8:40 PM EDT on September 21, 2005).)

Rita - rumors from the road

The stories from the people who tried to evacuate are going to be interesting. One of our neighbors took twelve hours to go about 30 miles before turning around. Another neighbor tried for twenty-five hours to get out before turning around. The gas stations were closed (because they were told they had to evacuate). Those that stayed open ran out of gas. It was 100 degrees in the cars, and at least five people died in their cars in Liberty County - some from the heat, some from carbon monoxide poisoning. People's pets died in their cars, and they just left the bodies on the side of the road. There were no restrooms available, so the side of the road became an open sewage area - they said it smelled exactly like what it was - an open latrine.

Rita - Saturday, 9/24/05 - 8:30 AM

Well, it's all over but the raking.
 
Last night the winds picked up and it was a constant 30 or 40 mph wind at the top of the trees. Ground level, the winds were probably 15 to 20 mph. We had about one-half inch of rain. No thunder or lightning. Overall, not even a storm worth mentioning.

This morning, the mayor and Sheila Jackson-Lee had a press conference telling people not to come back to the city - apparently taking the words from New Orleans - but for absolutely no reason. What possible reason would there be to stay away? The storm's completely gone - there's no rain, hardly any wind, we have lights and water. By 7 PM tonight, the city should be completely normal: if only 2.5 million people hadn't left and are now going to try coming back at the same time with no gasoline stations open.

Here's my new hurricane strategy. Do not evacuate unless (1) your house is going to flooded with at least one foot of water or (2) you're physically or pschologically unable to handle any stress at all. Are Americans now so unable to cope with the hardship of being without electricity for three days that we'd spend 24 hours in a traffic jam to avoid it? Because, let's face it - at no time did this storm ever pose a danger to any except to those 15% who live in Galveston or on the coast. But the media made the storm sound horrible (ignoring science and the forecasts) and the government ordered an evacuation of everyone. Kinda short-sighted, eh? Of course, in America's litigous society, you know that there are people who would blame the government for not making them evacuate.

One final note, I'll bet that a lot of stores are open by noon today - completely ignoring the mayor.

Rita - Friday, 9/23/05 - 8:30 AM

7 AM forecast is for Rita to weaken to low Cat 3 by landfall - now 6 hours later: noon Saturday. Still forecast for Beaumont.

The clouds are starting to come in. There is an ever-so-slight breeze (it's never windy in the morning here). It's time to start our preparations. Of course, we could have begun preparing earlier, but all the stores have been closed, and it's been 100 degrees - so what was the point?

Rita - Thursday, 9/22/05 - 10:30 AM

10 AM forecast is for Rita to weaken to Cat 3/4 by landfall even further east than before: now in Beaumont - 60 miles away. 60 miles means we may get gusts to 75 mph.

They just interviewed a lady who left her home from near here at 4:30 PM yesterday afternoon: she's just now passed Beltway 8 and US 290: the 50 minute drive has taken her 19 hours so far - and the forecast is for 11 more hours to go the next 60 miles.

Our evacuation plan is obviously horrendous: there is no way we're going to leave now: getting stuck in your car on a Houston freeway during a hurricane, when the freeways flood all the time spells disaster. Does this mean that we have to start evacuation 4 days in advance? Imagine Corpus Christi - they evacuated, and now the storm is 250 miles away, with virtually no chance of hitting them.

Rita - Thursday, 9/22/05 - 9:36 AM

7 AM forecast is for Rita to weaken to Cat 3/4 by landfall on the east side of the Bay of Galveston (newmakers are ignoring the 30 miles and just calling it Galveston). We'll be on the "weak" side of the storm. Storm surge predicted at 20 to 25 feet. Currently at Cat 5, steady for 8 hours.

It now only takes 30 minutes to get the 25 miles from our house to downtown, but 12 hours to go the next 100 miles. Traffic is completely stopped - although the state claims to be opening up the southband lanes for northbound traffic in 20 minutes - not sure what good that will do, since traffic will just whiz along until it stops for 12 hours at Buffalo...

It is unnaturally quiet here. Not a single car has been heard all morning. No lawnmowers. No builders. No planes overhead. And it's still 36 hours until the eye hits land.

It is unnaturally quiet here. Not a single car has been heard all morning. No lawnmowers. No builders. No planes overhead. And it's still 36 hours until the eye hits land.

We're still not sure about leaving. Steve wants to go now (where to? Shirley's? The storm could stall over Katy and she'll flood for sure. Joe and Leo's? they flood in a regular storm! Wait in traffic 12 hours to go to Rob's?) We still have to worry about our cat. And the neighbor's 4 cats. I'll stand by my original plan and wait until tomorrow's forecast and see where Rita will finally be forecast to land.

Rita - Wednesday, 9/21/05 - 10 PM

It's surreal here.
 
10 PM forecast is for Rita to weaken to Cat 3/4 by landfall at Freeport (80 miles away) on Saturday morning. Although Dr. Jeff Masters has no problem with his ultra-scary, worst-case predictions of complete disaster for Houston and Dallas!

The property managers of the IBM building kicked us out at noon - but I was in a telecon until 2 PM. I drove home, noticing that traffic was light on my 7 mile commute on the back roads. When I got home, Steve was watching TV - traffic on the "evacuation route" of Interstate 45 was stopped - a two hour drive to downtown Houston - and 12 hours to evacuate to Huntsville!

We called Stephanie and others to cancel the Miss Camp America Pageant rehearsal (traffic issues) and also to reschedule the Pageant for next Friday.

I walked around to the neighbors houses to see who was staying and who was going - everyone was going except Mr. Wu - who was doing what we were doing - waiting until Friday to make a rational decision. One of our neighbors' daughters was in the hospital and she was being evacuated to a Dallas hospital - so she had to go with her and was forved to leave her 4 cats. I said that we'd look after them, if we stayed.

By then, it was 3:45 PM, so we thought we'd go get to Gatti's for pizza. There were a few houses boarded up in the neighbor hood, and very little traffic on the first major street we turned on (east-west El Dorado). We passed by the Kroger and noticed it was open, but not especially busy - good thing - we needed bread and luncheon meat for the next two days - when we'd have electricity, but just be waiting for the storm. Then we noticed that the Shell station had removed the numbers from their signs - this is 2 and a half days before the hurricane, which only has about a 25% chance of hitting Houston!

We drove on to Gatti's and knew something was wrong when we pulled into the shopping center parking lot - there were no cars. Everything had closed - some businesses had board on the windows. We were both hungry, and traffic was still abnormally light, so we headed over to the main restaurant area on Bay Area Boulevard. Everything was closed. All businesses. All restaurants. Even the H-E-B grocery store was closed. I'd remembered that Kroger was opened and said that we'd better head over there and just hope that they had some bread - although it wasn't a big issue because we have a bread maker that we could use to make bread for the next 72 hours.

Kroger was open, but was closing at 6 PM. The store was busy with the workers removing the fruits, putting paper over dairy cases, and moving the meats somewhere. I snagged some lunch meat (again, we are going to have electricity for 72 more hours at least!) and then we went to gather some frozen pizza and other food. it was obvious that we are now going to have to eat at home for two days in a row! I cannot think of the last time that happened. In addition, we'll have to eat at home on Saturday - Hurricane day, too - we'l still be able to eat refrigerated food then, too. Interestingly, the store was out of water (we have plenty of water leftover from our parties - and we have two days to gather more!), out of crackers, and out of Almond Joy and Paydays. Plenty of everything else, though.

Rita - Wednesday, 9/21/05 - 9:49 AM
The IBM building is virtually empty, and people are leaving constantly. I can understand that preparations are necessary, but I don't expect Steve and I to spend more than 4 to 8 hours getting things ready.

As I'm typing this in, they announced that they are shutting off the power to the building at noon!

Over-reactions galore!
09.21.05 @ 10:29 AM CST [link] [No Comments]

Rita - Wednesday, 9/21/05 - morning
Last night on our way home from rehearsal at 11 PM, the most expensive gas station in Clear Lake had ten cars waiting in line for gas. One mile further on, where gas was ten cents a gallon cheaper, there was no one.

There were two families in our neighborhood this morning putting plywood on all their windows. It's something we should do, but we probably won't (and now there's no plywood to be had around here.)

Rita is currently forecast to hit Corpus Christi as a Cat 3/4 at 5 AM on Saturday morning and then track up the west side of Houston. If that's the case - we won't evacuate to Katy, since the hurricane will probably go right over the top of it.

I'm assuming that we'll be requested to evacuate tomorrow at noon (since Galveston County is only 4 miles from us and they're being forced to evacuate). We currently plan on staying, if the track is to Corpus/Katy. If the track moves further north, then we'll leave. But Corpus is 180 miles away (Matagorda is 110 miles away), so we should only get the edges of the storm (as a reference, Panama City, Florida is 180 miles from Gulfport, where Katrina came ashore).

All the schools are out until next Monday to prepare for the storm, so my commute was easy, but the sky's clear - so the main effect is that we're wasting education days on skittishness associated with Katrina. It is still 72 hours from landfall, after all, and the chances keep going down with each forecast that it'll hit this far north.
09.21.05 @ 08:38 AM CST [link] [No Comments]

Hurricane Rita

I'm so stressed about Hurricane Rita that I'm going to blog to get my feelings off my chest.

First - the storm is currently predicted to hit somewhere between Brownsville and Galveston at 8AM on Saturday (it's 1:26 PM on Tuesday).

See "More" for lots of details.

WWJD
This is pretty old, and I may have even blogged it before - watch the Bush television ad - but it's still my opinion of George Bush (buy your souvenirs here!) and the Christians in the Republican Party.
09.09.05 @ 09:19 AM CST [link] [No Comments]

Christians and New Orleans

With so much death and destruction in New Orleans (mainly to the poor areas - the French Quarter, Central Business District and Garden District were pretty much spared),
Christians are showing their true colors again with this comment from Repent America: "this act of God destroyed a wicked city" (their front page has the quote "And of some have compassion, making a difference" from Jude 1.)
Why aren't mainstream Christians upset about these people and protesting? Or do the Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics and people of Lakewood Church agree with them?
09.01.05 @ 10:20 AM CST [link] [2 Comments]