Highways are always jammed before hurricanes. They knew it would happen. I have very deep feelings about the mess on the highways there. If the jams continue, those people could be without recourse to shelter as the storm nears. I get very angry, as they should either admit it or fix it someway.
I even wrote a diary about the subject here recently. It is serious to me as many of us had friends stuck on highways last year with nowhere to stay. One couple we know just went to a hospital and stayed the hurricane out in the lobby, miles away from home.
If you evacuate, you are running the chance of heading toward the hurricane if it changes direction. If you don’t evacuate you could be in worse danger. Here is the diary I wrote previously, just some random thoughts.
Evacuation is taking chances
I found this article just now at the Houston Chronicle. There are things in this article that could have been fixed. They happened in Florida last year, they knew it would happen. I know some things are too massive to do anything about, but they don’t have to act clueless about them.
Havoc from hurricane comes early to Houston’s freeways
Trying to leave Houston on I-10, Ella Corder drove 15 hours to go just 13 miles today. Noticing cars out of gas littering the freeway, she turned off her air-conditioner to save fuel, but the 52-year-old heart patient worried the heat and exhaustion were taking a toll on her.
“All I want to do is go home,” she said tearfully by cell phone. “Can’t anyone get me out of here? ”
“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” said Julie Anderson, who covered just 45 miles in 12 hours after setting out from her home in the Houston suburb of LaPorte. “They say we’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina. Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”
When you go on that highway in 100 degree weather, you are taking a chance on many things. You need to find gas to keep going. If you run out of gas on the highway, what do you do? Where do you go to get out of the heat? Where do you go to the restroom? And on and on.
It took Tiffany Heikkila 11 hours to drive with her 5-year-old son from Sugar Land to Austin. She left at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and saw gas station lines backed up all the way to the exit ramps. Motel parking lots were packed, too.
“All along the way, cars were pulled off on the shoulder with drivers sleeping. They had their doors open with one foot hanging out of the car..”
Gary and Sunni Markowitz left Bellaire at 5:30 a.m. today but after six hours were only 20 miles into their trip to Austin.
With three children and a nanny in tow, they had run through three DVDs and all the snacks in the minivan. Their two-year-old was crying. A friend who was following them in another car with two children had already turned around for home, and they were seriously thinking about it themselves.
Countless others regretted their decision to leave. After nearly 14 hours on the road with her husband, two sons and dog, and nowhere near their destination of Paris, Chava Buse was ready to return to their Sugar Land home. They family stopped at five gas stations in a futile search for fuel before finding long lines and flaring tempers as people waited in the scorching heat to pay…..”
A Texas friend shared an email from her friend who has met with FEMA in Dallas. There was one paragraph from it that really concerned me a lot. It furthers my fears that people evacuating will be victims all over again with no place to go. Someone also shared this at DU, and it is legit.
“Also, FEMA is not in the business of sheltering. The RED CROSS is ready to open new shelters for the Rita evacuees but cannot do so until the city gives the word. At last night’s meeting Dallas city officials had not done so and had no plans to do so. Thus, at this time no new shelters will open in Dallas.
Rumor Control: Houston Katrina evacuees still in shelters are not coming to Dallas. They have been airlifted to Fort Chafe, Arkansas.
This picture is from Florida last year before France, the 2nd hurricane to hit us.
This picture is from Texas today near Houston. You simply can not tell the difference. They knew this would happen. They have not worked on evacuations issues anywhere, and it has been a year.
The highways in Texas today look no different than the ones in Florida did last year.
world. But man, aren’t those gas prices sweet? Can’t you just see them jiving and hi-fiving that their buddies’ stock is going up? And Alberto Gonzo is to investigate gouging – isn’t that lovely?
on MSNBC. It is so scary looking. Many of the people in Galveston did not evacuate because they saw the images of the traffic logjams on TV.
They figured they were safer at home. I hope God is with them. This makes me so sad.
Vulnerable people on the highway through no fault of their own, and many who stayed thinking they would be safer.
Those are about the only choices we have now in states without a good mass transit system.
It is fucking outrageous. The highways are becoming the superdome incident of Rita.I hope these people fry their representatives at election time.
from Texas on their interviews on the news last night everything is going swimmingly because they have had “a plan” for many years. Why the hell didn’t they open the other lanes earlier and just where are they going to put all these people.
The other thing that disgusts me is the f’ing Red Cross. Over and over again we have heard the nightmare stories of people still waiting for help, water, food, shelter and in the meantime where the hell is all the money going we have been sending them? What the hell are they waiting for? The incompetant government to give them the word it is ok to help now? WTF? Somebody please take charge and do the GD right thing for these people. We are talking now about people dying on the highways to hell!
making excuses for these ill-prepared “public servants”.
My brother-in-law just arrived. He was on the road from 5pm until 6am; usually a 5 hour ride, from the Houston area. He said at one point, two police cars came at him on the highway driving fast; he had to go into the ditch to avoid them. They were making the highway one way in the other direction, in a very dangerous manner.
He said he saw ambulances everywhere, people lying on the side of the highway passed out from heat stroke. People going to the bathroom, no privacy. Cars running out of gas everywhere, being pushed off of the highway. People now waiting for gas on the side of the highway. It was a nightmare. Many are turning back, to what fate? Many would rather take their chances with the hurricane.
This is so totally fucked. How oh how can we be so ill prepared four years after 9/11. Osama has to be laughing his ass off. He doesn’t have to attack us. Our own government is doing it for him.
Here’s what I was thinking about last nite:
duranta — I’m glad you brother made it safely….
This is a fucking nightmare — hang in there lady, I’ll be thinking of you!
thank you Brinnainne. Once again I feel fortunate for our relative safety.
I am hpoing beyond hope that they get the highway situation taken care of before tongiht…
That is the first thing I see on my TV this morning.
“A bus is on fire on I-45, the fire was caused by the explosion.”
“We are trying to get more details for you…”
“And now, the weather.”
What the FUCK? Are there roadside boms in Texas now? How does a fucking bus EXPLODE on the freeway?
It is going to be a looong fucking day.
On a brighter note, taku and his family got here at 11 last night. It took them 7 1/2 hours to get here from Katy….two hour, 2 and 1/2, drive.
At least they got here!
It was filled with old people with portable oxygen tanks.
Before an O2 tank explodes the heat of the fire is already way beyond survivable.
They are going with the story that the front brakes of the bus caught fire. This is too absurd for words.
I know I don’t know what happened, but I also know we are being fed pure crap.
Katrina redux. I see a trend.
And secondary roads had no one on them when we evacuated from Fl. last year. It took us 6 hrs to go from Orlando to Hardeeville SC. About how long it takes when there is no evac. Sometimes the back roads are faster than the interstate, provided you know the route.
I was wondering about that. Because it seems like another advantage would be that shelter would be closer to a back road than an interstate.
Maybe.
A friend trying to get home to Austin from Houston yesterday said she tried the backroads – better for a few miles (“got up to 15mph!”) but then it was clogged too. Stuck again.
Highways and their on-ramps act somewhat like a transistor. The on-ramps feed into and control the number of vehicles per hour, putting a large enough ‘current’ into the collector results in a large enough ‘impedence’ resulting in thermal run-away (a traffic jam). Limiting the on-ramps doesn’t help as it is the number of cars per hour entering the highway that is the controlling factor.
…the incredibly inept evacuation of Houston-Galveston, by which many people may wind up sitting in their cars when Rita hits, has me boiling.
Not that it would have completely solved the problem, but the fact that nobody thought to open up all (or most) incoming lanes of the freeways to stalled outgoing traffic for an entire 24 hours after the evacuation was ordered marks the emergency preparedness bosses in Texas (and maybe at FEMA) as clueless. What in the name of sweet Jesus were they thinking during all those hours as they watched the jam-packed, nearly motionless lanes right next to the empty lanes?
Morons.
Glad you chimed in, MB. I’ve felt a bit guilty about ranting the past couple of days but I just can’t process this any other way right now. This is so unbelievable. I know I’m being driven by fear – fear of what’s going to happen to those trying to evacuate, but it is definitely justified. I feel the same anxiety I did when I watched the coverage of the people stranded in NO begging for their lives. It’s just too much.
that the evac of NO – with all of its failings – managed to get 80% of its people out in less time and without the total gridlock we’re seeing in Texas because they reversed the lanes on the freeways immediately. Anyone know if this was actually the case?
NO is much smaller than Houston, but they have fewer routes out of town it looks like to me, because of the river and the lakes. So even though they should have done better getting out people who couldn’t just get in cars and take off – it seems like they did handle the car evac better.
Yes, we planned the contraflow way in advance, because of the gridlock created by Hurricane George. Learned the hard way, just like Texas this time. What a bunch of nincompoops after watching La. evacuate for Katrina. Didn’t they learn anything? Didn’t contraflow make sense long before this storm?
Propose solution.
Use the highway patrol to guide and monitor traffic: Regulate on ramps, reverse southbound off ramps and southbound lanes. Put up signs–they should have been printed years ago, but you can use a magic-marker if you have to.
Keep it moving! Traffic should flow between 20 and 40 mph. (Up to 50 is okay if you can achieve it, but steadiness, not speed, is the virtue here.) Don’t let people stop-and-go, and don’t let them idle their engines. Put them in a queue if you have to, and make them wait their turn–engines off. When their turn comes, get them out there and rolling.
Use the radio for real instructions, not-bubble head bullshit.
Remove disabled vehicles from the traffic stream.
On the back of an envelop you can estimate how much gas is needed to get people out the region by car: Start moving gas (and diesel) to the pumps near the evacuation routes. Eliminate price gouging–by force if need be. Stranding people because the they don’t have a few bucks to pay for gas is both cruel and stupid. (ANYTHING that disrupts traffic flow is stupid.)
LOOK–I can do this in five minutes. What have the “authorities” been doing over the last few weeks, not to say last two years?
Thats the report I just received from the local news here in Houston. At present the Houston freeways are deserted. Traffic problems, people stranded without gasoline, are up country more so than down here.
I’m not leaving. I’ll be blogging this over at our word under this title, Texas History Movies – Blogging Hurricane Rita, until the power goes out. The little jog to the north of west yesterday looks like it will spare us from bearing the brunt of the storm but who can say?
Right now the weather has noticably changed as of noon central in galveston, but it hasn’t begun raining yet. I’m up from the coast a ways, here, the wind is picking up a little but the sun’s still shining.