Flip Flop
The storm is weakening, but this evacuation is quickly turning disastrous. Early this morning a bus carrying evacuees from a nursing home in Bellaire caught fire and exploded on the way to Dallas, shutting down I-45.
Not that there are many people still trying to get through. Most of the people on 45 have run out of gas and pulled off the freeway to ride out the storm wherever they are. The state is sending fuel trucks around to all the shelters, escorted by police and National Guardsmen who “are armed and will shoot.”
One of my mom’s friends in The Woodlands, north of Houston along 45, says that the (enormous) mall parking lot is completely full. The mall itself is closed, but everyone who ran out of gas nearby has pulled into the parking lot to camp out.
Meanwhile, the weatherfolks are predicting that Hurricane Rita, which has dropped almost to a Cat 3, is still on track to make landfall around Beaumont, near the Texas-Louisiana border. Many of the coastal communities further south have learned from New Orleans and are already implementing curfews to protect their mostly deserted communities from looters.
Overall, it seems that all the hype and overreaction of the last three days has been just that. The politicians, in their hourly press conferences, have changed their message from “Get out right now unless you are living in a bomb shelter and/or are crazy,” to “If you’re still home, don’t leave unless you’re in a mobile home on the beach.” I exaggerate, of course, but the change has indeed been dramatic.
It’s safe to say that most of this mess was caused (or at least worsened) by Katrina. The officials are attempting to avoid the criticism that has plagued the NO, LA, and federal leaders by urging everyone to leave, and the people themselves are panicking slightly more than necessary and exacerbating the shortages of food, fuel, and roadspace. You can hardly blame them—Katrina’s impact on NO was terrible, and we want to learn from our mistakes.
Climatologists are warning that global warming will make violent hurricane seasons like this one increasingly common. If their dire predictions come true, the monster stormclouds set to devastate the Gulf Coast may have a silver lining: with any luck, we’ll be able to Goldilocks our way to an effective disaster-mitigation plan. Katrina’s evacuation was too lackadaisical, and Rita’s is too frenzied, but Alpha’s may be juuuuuust right.
Tags: Hurricane Rita
September 30th, 2005 at 11:46 am
I think the reason the message changed dramatically on Friday was because the time of landfall was closer and after the hellish mess of traffic Wednesday and Thursday they didn’t want to continue screaming “get out, get out” and risk having MORE people stranded on the highway when the storm hit. I mean, at that point they were still trying to clear the roads. The message I heard was basically, “If you’re not out by now it’s too late to leave.” If it had hit here the worst place to be would have been in a car on the road or parking lot. We were lucky the storm turned.