Gridlocked exodus as Rita howls towards Houston
Drivers ran out of petrol in 14-hour traffic jams or looked in vain for a place to stay as hotels hundreds of kilometres in from the coast filled up. Others got tired of waiting in traffic and turned around and went home.
An estimated 1.8 million residents or more in Texas and Louisiana were under orders to evacuate to avoid a deadly repeat of Katrina.
The storm weakened yesterday morning from a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4 as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico.
Highways leading inland out of Houston, a metropolitan area of four million people, were clogged up to 160km north of the city. Service stations reported running out of petrol and police officers carried petrol to motorists who ran out. Texas authorities also asked the Pentagon for help in getting petrol to drivers stuck in traffic and sent petrol tankers to take up positions along evacuation routes to help.
Trazanna Moreno tried to leave Houston for the 360km trip to Dallas on US 90 but turned back after getting stuck in traffic.
“We ended up going six miles in two hours and 45 minutes,” said Ms Moreno, whose neighbourhood is not expected to flood. “It could be that if we ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere that we’d be in a worse position in a car dealing with hurricane-force winds than we would in our house.”
With traffic at a dead halt, fathers and sons got out of their cars and played catch on freeway medians. Others stood next to their cars, videotaping the scene or walked between vehicles, chatting with people.
Hotels filled up all the way to the Oklahoma and Arkansas line. John Decker, 47, decided to board up his home and hunker down because he could not find a hotel room.
“I’ve been calling since yesterday morning all the way up to about one this morning. No vacancies anywhere,” he said. “I checked all the way from here to Del Rio to Eagle Pass. I called as far as Lufkin, San Marcos, San Angelo. The only place I didn’t call was El Paso. By the time you reach El Paso, it’s almost time to turn back.”
Along the Gulf Coast, federal, state and local officials heeded the bitter lessons of Katrina: Hundreds of buses were dispatched to evacuate the poor. Hospital and nursing home patients were cleared out and truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals and rescue and medical teams were put on standby.
Texas authorities also planned to airlift at least 9,000 people from Beaumont and Houston, including nursing home residents and the homeless.
Galveston was a virtual ghost town by late Wednesday. The coastal city of 58,000 - situated on an island 2.4m above sea level - was nearly wiped off the map in 1900 when an unnamed hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 in what is still the nation’s deadliest natural disaster.
Anthony Jones, who lives on the west end of Galveston, arrived at an Austin evacuation centre in the middle of the night with his wife. “We’re in the area without a seawall and understand what’s coming,” he said. His wife, Lila, added: “At this point we don’t know whether we’ll come home to splinters or what.”
Joe Todaro from Santa Fe, Texas, near Galveston, said: “I’ve lived there for 75 years and this is the first hurricane that I’ve run from.”
