What was your Hurricane Rita experience? Did you stay or did you go? What did you find when it was all over?

At about 7:00 pm on Wednesday night, the City of Houston called for a mandatory evacuation of the area where my husband works. He went back down to secure the office, got back around 2:00 am, and we were on the road by 3:00 am headed for San Antonio.

We flew down 59 S, when we got to I-10 we hit gridlock, so we decided to "take a back road" and go Alt-90. Still bumper to bumper. It took 6 hours just to get on the West side of Houston.

After 8 hours, we made it to Sealy and were down to a half a tank of gas. My father-in-law met us in Schulenberg with more gas. We might have made it close enough to San Antonio to find gas, but it would have been close. In total, it took 15 hours to get to San Antonio.

It was just bizarre. It reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath and the migration out to California. There were people parked on the shoulder of the road sleeping in their car because they had been driving for days. The rest stops had massive amounts of people sitting in the grass eating, with garbage cans already overflowing.

When we stopped in Sealy at a Subway to get something to eat, they closed the store behind us because they had run out of food.

When they opened the contra-lanes on I-10, there were people that crossed the median to get over and we saw one truck that had flipped when they tried to drive up an embankment to get across.

We came back on Sunday, our house was intact, other than a tree with the main branch split off. No electricity, of course. So we had to drive to I-45 and beltway 8 before we found a hotel with a vacancy. They had electricity, but no water or cable.

The electricity came on at our house on Monday morning, and we spent most of the day getting things settled and picked up around the house. A total of 34 bags of debris before we ran out of trash bags.

I feel for Louisiana, but I am SO glad the storm shifted and didn't hit Houston and Galveston. If it hadn't, Kingwood would look like Lake Charles and all that would be left would big a pile of lumber.

We headed out at 5am on Thursday morning from Humble on N I-59.
We spent 14 hours just to get to 40 miles north of Humble. We ended up in Branson, Missouri... it took us 34 hours total. It took us 11 hours to get back home on Monday.
I am very dissappointed with our Mayor and the entire planning committee... if there was a planning committee.
I-45 and I-10 are major highways, however so is I-59 and if you expect to evacuate over 2 million people, then you better plan on opening all freeways exiting the city. Stop people from entering a city that is in the direct path of a major hurricane.

I am very thankful we were not hit by this hurricane, however this has taught me that the people in charge are not capable of handling an evacuation this size of Houston and I do not want to be in another evacuation while they are in charge.. and by they, I am saying Bill White.
Shame on him. He knew just like all of us that the hurricane was coming for us.. and all he had to say was... We have no plan for Houston, Please use your best sense and Good Luck.

Not good enough Bill White... not good enough.

Post edited by: mrsannacampbell, at: 2005/11/02 00:24