"This is a website that originated because of an online fantasy game. What the hell makes you think anyone here knows anything about women?" - Boddi The Ranger
First Katrina, now Rita, what are y'all doing out there? Hurricanes are supposed to give us days and days warning, not pop into existance right over the islands and heading right at us.
Well, I see the laws of cosmic irony still apply. This one is surely going to hit you, whip through Miami just south of me (and the Keys too, but they'll be ok. They drink 'Ritas for breakfast down there), and then straight on towards Houston.
Under "You've got to F-ing be kidding" news, people in the path of Hurricane Rita are stuck because of traffic congestion and many of the problems that cause those in New Orleans to be unable to leave.
Evacuees stranded again
Traffic, lack of money force many to stay put
Friday, September 23, 2005; Posted: 12:19 p.m. EDT (16:19 GMT)
HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Wilma Skinner would like to scream at the officials of this city. If only they would pick up their phones.
"I done called for a shelter, I done called for help. There ain't none. No one answers," she said, standing in blistering heat outside a check-cashing store that had just run out of its main commodity. "Everyone just says, 'Get out, get out.' I've got no way of getting out. And now I've got no money."
With Hurricane Rita breathing down Houston's neck, those with cars were stuck in gridlock trying to get out. Those like Skinner -- poor, and with a broken-down car -- were simply stuck and fuming at being abandoned, they say.
"All the banks are closed, and I just got off work," said Thomas Visor, holding his sweaty paycheck as he, too, tried to get inside the store, where more than 100 people, all of them black or Hispanic, fretted in line. "This is crazy. How are you supposed to evacuate a hurricane if you don't have money? Answer me that?"
Some of those who did have money, and did try to get out, didn't get very far.
Judie Anderson of La Porte, Texas, covered just 45 miles in 12 hours. She had been on the road since 10 p.m. Wednesday, headed toward Oklahoma, which by Thursday was still very far away.
"This is the worst planning I've ever seen," she said. "They say, 'We've learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina.' Well, you couldn't prove it by me."
On Bellaire Boulevard in southwest Houston, a weeping woman and her young daughter stood on the sidewalk, surrounded by plastic bags full of clothes and blankets. "I'd like to go, but nobody come get me," the woman said in broken English. When asked her name, she looked frightened. "No se, no se," she said: Spanish for "I don't know."
Her daughter, who appeared to be about 9, whispered in English, "We're from Mexico."
Stranded poor
Census figures show Harris County had 3.6 million people in 2004, of whom 14.7 percent lived below the poverty level while 8.7 percent of households lacked a vehicle, both percentages slightly higher than national figures. More than one-third spoke a language other than English at home.
For the poor and the disenfranchised, the mighty evacuation orders that preceded Rita were something they could only ignore.
Eddie McKinney, 64, who had no home, no teeth and a torn shirt, stood outside the EZ Pawn shop, drinking a beer under a sign that said, "No Loitering."
"We got no other choice but to stay here. We're homeless and we're broke," he said. "I thought about going to Dallas, but now it's too late. I got no way to get there."
Where will he stay?
"A nice white man gave me a motel room for three days. Just walked up and said, 'Here.' So my buddy and me will stick it out," he said, pointing to another homeless man. "We got a half-gallon of whiskey and a room."
In Deer Park, a working-class suburb of refineries south of Houston, Stacy and Troy Curtis, waited for help outside the police station. Less than three weeks ago, the couple left New Orleans after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
With no vehicle, and little money, they tried to get their lives together while staying at a hotel in Deer Park. Stacy Curtis, a nursing assistant in New Orleans, had a job interview scheduled for Thursday.
But most businesses had shut down because the neighborhood will likely flood if the hurricane hits Galveston Bay. The streets were empty Thursday afternoon.
"We're stuck here," Stacy Curtis said. "Got no other place to go."
An emergency official eventually sent a van to take the couple to a shelter at a recreation center.
Monica Holmes, who has debilitating lupus, sat in her car at a Houston gas station that had no gas. "We can't go nowhere," she said, tapping a fingernail against the dashboard fuel gauge. "Look here," she said. "I'm right on E."
Her husband, a security guard, had a paycheck, but no way to cash it.
"We were going to try to go to Nacogdoches" in east Texas, not far from the Louisiana border, she said. "But even if we could get on the road, we're not going to get out. These people that left yesterday, they're still on the beltway. They haven't even got out of Houston."
So she and her husband will hunker down in their Missouri City home, just to the south. "We'll be fine," she said. "You can't be scared of what God can do. I'm covered."
Toughing it out
As always, there were those who chose to stay, no matter how dire the warnings.
John Benson, a 47-year-old surfer and lifelong Galveston resident, said he thinks his town "is going to take on a lot of water. But as far as the winds, I think here on the island, it will be a little bit less than they anticipated."
Mandatory evacuation orders were issued Wednesday for the area.
Benson said he planned to use his surfboard as transportation after the hurricane. "The main thing is you have a contingency plan," he said, and thumped his board. "You got buoyancy."
Skinner, accompanied by her 6-year-old grandson, Dageneral Bellard, would settle for a bus.
"They got them for the outlying areas, for the Gulf and Galveston, but they ain't made no preparations for us in the city, for the poor people here. There ain't no (evacuation) buses here. I got nowhere to go."
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
*- quoted it its entirety because of CNN's habit of changing or removing stories from its original link.
I think less than a month is more than sufficient time to adequately modify an infrastructure for a completely random natural phenomenon.
Well, you can only assume that after seeing how FUBAR'd things were last time, that other areas would have at least put some thought into how they would do things better if it happened to them. I haven't looked closely into it (hi, I'm lazy!) but from that article a couple posts up it doesn't really sound like anything is going to be better this time around.
Luckily Rita didn't hit land at full strength, or in the most vulnerable areas, or else things would have been a lot worse. However, we have seen the same issues in Houston and Texas as we saw in the aftermath of Katrina. If we didn't believe it before, we know now that Louisiana officials are not the only ones with problems coordinating disaster prevention and recovery plans.
For all the things the federal government does, this is something that pretty much everybody agrees is actually something that it should be doing. We have to put pressure on the federal government - and keep it there - to reform how it manages disaster prevention and recovery efforts.
Rita Spares Cities, Devastates Rural Areas; Loss of Power, Flooding Keep Many From Returning; [FINAL Edition]
Doug Struck and Dana Milbank. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Sep 26, 2005. pg. A.01
Hurricane Rita's floodwaters receded Sunday along the Texas- Louisiana coastline, revealing devastated rural communities but lighter-than-expected damage to major population centers and to vital energy facilities in the area.
After the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina, which since it struck in late August has killed more than 1,000, displaced hundreds of thousands and is forecast to cost the federal government alone about $200 billion, Rita's impact was closer to that of other major hurricanes. Most of the more than 3 million people who evacuated in advance of the storm were preparing to return home. Costs were put in the low billions of dollars and only two deaths were attributed to the storm.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people were told they could not return to their homes in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana because water, power, sewage and emergency services will not be restored for weeks, authorities said. Police blocked exits off interstate highways leading to Beaumont, which once held 110,000 people but is now largely a ghost town.
Rita hit the United States early Saturday with winds of 120 mph, bringing up to a foot of rain and a 15-foot storm surge. It caused the greatest harm in less-populated areas of Louisiana and Texas, near this city and Port Arthur. About 2 million people overall lost power.
In a speech on Sunday, Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Rita's "effects appear to be relatively modest" on economic growth. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said the storm was "not anywhere near as bad as we thought it was going to be." Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," he said oil platforms and refineries in the area are "in relatively good shape."
Perry, on CNN's "Late Edition," put the damage in his state at about $8 billion; that would rank Rita far behind Katrina in impact but still among the most damaging storms to hit the United States.
Rita may also lead to changes in government policy. Officials are reviewing urban evacuation plans after suffocating traffic blocked departures from Houston. President Bush suggested that Congress examine whether the military should play a larger role in reacting to domestic disasters.
At the edges of the storm, rainfall and high water worsened problems in New Orleans, where repairs to a temporary levee could not prevent parts of the city from flooding again. The Army Corps of Engineers dropped sandbags to plug the gap as officials tried to pump the latest floodwaters from the city. Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who is leading the federal government's Katrina recovery efforts, said it could take until June to rebuild the levees.
In Baton Rouge, La., Bush was given what he called an "optimistic appraisal" of the New Orleans flood-control system. The president, who is expected to travel to the region on Tuesday for the seventh time since Katrina struck, cautioned people in Louisiana and Texas to heed state leaders' advice on when it was safe to return home. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said the city will reopen to business owners and residents of the Algiers neighborhood starting Monday.
Houston, spared Rita's full wrath, slowly began to return to life on Sunday, as some of its 2 million residents returned. Perry urged an "orderly migration" back to Houston, after the enormous traffic jams that marred the evacuation of that city before the storm.
Officials attributed Rita's lesser impact to several factors. The storm did not produce the rainfall that had been predicted, and it missed urban areas such as Houston and Galveston, Tex. Also, residents in the stricken areas, with images of Katrina's devastation fresh in their minds, evacuated in large numbers; government agencies at all levels, anxious not to repeat the slow response to Katrina, quickly rescued the stranded and delivered relief supplies using airlifts and trucks.
R. David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said there was "absolutely phenomenal" coordination and preparation. He said many preparations went unneeded. Texas received 3.8 million liters of water, 193 truckloads of ice and 320,000 military meal rations, but "we've had minimal requests for some of those commodities," Paulison said. He said FEMA would move more water and ice to Louisiana.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), in an interview Sunday in Austin, said: "I think what happened in Texas demonstrates that when state, local and federal officials have a plan and work together, it can work successfully."
Still, the response was not trouble-free in the worst-hit areas. In addition to Beaumont, authorities blocked Port Arthur, Orange and other towns, and Louisiana officials in hard-hit areas across the state line made similar pleas for patience, painting a bleak picture of the storm's havoc.
"This is not a livable place," said **** Nugent, mayor of Nederland, south of Beaumont. "We do not have water yet. We do not have power yet. All we have is a mess."
Frustrations were evident at all levels. Residents caught in the gridlock of evacuation were locked out of their communities. Local officials offered some of the first vocal complaints about the federal response to Hurricane Rita, saying the government was ensnarled in red tape.
"We've got 50 generators sitting on trailers that would get water and sewer back running, but they won't let us unload them," fumed Carl Griffith, the administrative judge of Jefferson County in Texas. "There's still a breakdown of communication between the state and federal government."
Griffith said he was forced to rage at federal authorities to instigate the airlift that took more than 1,300 patients out of local hospitals and nursing homes, and whenever he appealed for help, "All I get is, 'Sorry, can't do that.' "
Across the region, water, electric, telecommunications and other utilities were knocked out, as hundreds of thousands of trees were felled. The home of Port Arthur Mayor Oscar Ortiz burned down after the storm passed. "The fire department got there, but they had no water to pump," Griffith said.
Rita, though delivering a weaker-than-anticipated blow, added another major wave of suffering to the Gulf Coast, where 1.4 million people have registered with FEMA for help since Katrina struck. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), after touring Cameron Parish near the Texas line, reported that "everything is just obliterated."
The Louisiana State University Health Care Services Division, which lost its flagship Charity Hospital in Katrina, evacuated hospitals in Lake Charles, Lafayette and Houma, CEO Don Smithburg said. "The hospitals Katrina didn't blast, Rita did," he said in an interview Sunday.
Entergy, the electric utility for southwestern Louisiana and eastern Texas, is bringing in 4,000 linemen and other workers from out of state. But their utility trucks are being led by crews of tree-removal squads that must first clear the roads.
Joe Domino, the CEO of Entergy, met with local officials and acknowledged that Rita was the worst storm he had seen in 35 years with the company. He said it "may be over a month for some customers" before power is restored.
The Energy Department reported Sunday that 1.5 million customers were without power in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi from the damage done by both hurricanes. Entergy warned of rolling blackouts if residents in unaffected parts of the state do not voluntarily cut back on power usage. Temperatures in much of southern Texas were in the nineties Sunday, reaching near-record highs.
Nearly a quarter of U.S. refining production, shuttered before Rita, remained closed Sunday. A refinery in Port Arthur and one in Beaumont were without power, and a second Port Arthur refinery was damaged and could remain out of service for two to four weeks. But companies were not predicting prolonged outages of facilities.
Major mobile phone companies said preliminary estimates suggested that damage from the storm had been far less than expected.
The optimistic assessments were little comfort to residents of the stricken shoreline. Ed Kane, sheriff of Hardin County, northwest of Beaumont, said even those who managed to stay will be told to leave. "Our county was closed off a half-hour ago, and those who are there are being urged to go," he said late Sunday.
Despite the orders to stay away, some people were attempting to return. Some were foiled by roadblocks; others by a lack of gasoline. Throughout the region, small groups of motorists gathered at stations, waiting for the pumps to resume providing gas.
Rosa Allen, 64, slept in her car Saturday night at a gasoline station a few miles out of Port Arthur, her home. She had fled before the storm to Shreveport, La., but found no shelter and no food there and turned around. She almost made it home before being stopped by the police and a gas gauge on empty.
"The police said they would have to arrest me if I stayed. I said I would welcome jail. At least they would give me a place to sleep, a toilet and some food," she said.
In Port Arthur, Jeff Savoy, 38, had scoffed at the storm on Saturday as he sat on his stoop, drinking beer, waiting for Rita. He was there again Sunday afternoon, looking decidedly more dejected. "I wish I would have left," he said. "We got through it. But this house was shaking. I didn't know whether we were coming or going."
Milbank reported from Washington. Staff writers Spencer S. Hsu, Ceci Connolly, Steve Hendrix, Arshad Mohammed and Justin Blum contributed to this report.
