Texas Is Evacuating The Coast
The Rita evacuation was a disaster in its own right, but Texas learned the lessons and has been conducting a generally orderly withdrawal from the coast.
CNN has two reports on the efforts. The first was on the southern counties, Texans flee 7 coastal counties ahead of Ike, and later on the area around Houston, Galveston, part of Houston evacuated ahead of Ike.
They have altered their plans based on the hurricane altering its course.
Later they will be criticized for evacuating people who didn’t need to evacuate, which is ignorant. No one needs to hang around to watch a hurricane come ashore. If you want to know what its like, the short description is a 48-hour root canal.
If that doesn’t convince you, you could always find someone with a really fast pick-up. Harness yourself in the bed of the pick-up and have the driver go up to freeway speeds. For real authenticity, take along a tank of water and have a passenger hose you down while you are traveling at 75 mph. That’s what the winds and rain feel like in a Category 1 hurricane. Now, for more authenticity you put a wooden crate in the back of the pick-up and sit inside to give you a feel for the sounds you hear inside a frame house, wondering if the roof will be torn off.
If you have the money, I assure you, you will leave for tropical storms because if the power goes out, you have lost air conditioning and refrigeration, and, no, it isn’t a friendly neighborhood camping trip, because there are a lot of people who can’t afford to replace the food that was spoiled.
Oh, another thing that I never see mentioned on the media “hurricane preperation checklists” is to get cash. When the power goes out, you have a straight cash economy. The credit card and check verification systems don’t work without power, so you need cash for everything.
Given all of the refineries on the Texas Coast, you better get ready for $5/gallon again.
4 comments
you know that someone lives in florida if they have no more than $20 worth of food in their freezer and refrigerator.
cash, water, full gas tank, pet food [and cat litter]. paper plates, plasticware, paper towels and bleach. medicines. and more cash.
i used to keep a couple weeks worth of non-perishable food, but i’ve pared that down to only a few days worth [whatever i’d want to carry in a backpack if i had to evacuate]. up to a category 3, and maybe a low category 4, most of the stores here are going to reopen in a day or so, and trucks bringing more food will get through shortly after that. big bad category4/5 and i’m outta here, so no need to leave lots of food behind to get washed away in the storm.
lots and lots and lots of people rode out opal sitting in their cars on the clogged-up highways. i’m amazed scads of them weren’t killed. the only way to avoid that kind of gridlock is to evacuate early, which means looking silly if the hurricane changes course. better silly than dead.
ivan was supposed to hit new orleans, and veered over here at the last minute. i forget what the number was but something like 100,000 [more?] left new orleans [late] and ended up stranded on the highways for 20+ hours. fortunately for them, ivan gave them a pass. i’ve often wondered if that ‘dry run’ [people complained mightily about having to leave for nothing] played into how the katrina evacuation was [non]handled the following year.
Two days before Katrina was forecast to land it was headed right at me over here, but it moved further West and landed at the Miss-La border. I was 12 hours from leaving when it continued to move West.
We have one road to the North that becomes a single lane in Alabama.
My Mother got directed towards Atlanta during Opal and had the damn following her the whole way. Things got really dicey when a tornado touched down near the evacuation route.
Around here you have to leave early or stick it out. I got her out for Ivan and then came back to take care of things.
You just don’t want to be in a city with no traffic lights or air conditioning for days or weeks.
we went to tennessee for opal, and just barely dodged the tornadoes that followed us. saw lots and lots of tornado damage to the trees on i-65 in alabama on the way home.
If you drove up I-65, like I did, you could have enjoyed the light show as the heavy rains shorted out electrical substations, and then you could stop every so often to haul the chain saw out of the back of the truck to clear a tree off the road so you could continue.