As 1.3 million Texans evacuate coastal regions and Hurricane Rita approaches, slightly weakened but still one of the strongest storms the Gulf has ever seen, preparations seem to be mostly on track. Shelters are designated and being filled, suplies and emergency crews are pre-positioned and last bus pickups are being arranged.
Still, there have been hiccups. Many of the motorists stacked up on roads out of Houston are running out of gas. There are no, that is zero, hotel vacancies that anyone knows of left in Texas and hundreds of thousands still on the road and the shelters nearer the coast simply don't have the capacity to hold everyone. After one Houston evacuee managed a huge six miles in almost 3 hours he said:
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.
That has to be a worry for a lot of people out on the highways of Texas today.
Breaking - as I type this Fox has just said that the mandatory evacuation order for Corpus Christi has been cancelled. That must mean they are sure Rita wil come ashore nearer to Galveston than Corpus. The storm has also been downgraded to Cat. Four. The time is 1.00pm central. This is bad news for Houston and Galveston but good news for San Antonio. We won't have to deal with hurricane winds, it looks like - now all we have to worry about is torrential rain. Some forecasters are saying between 15 and thirty inches in 24 hours. San Antonio will be a lake if that happens. One wonders if FEMA did a good thing parking all the big-rig trailers with their emergency supplies on an air base slap in the middle of the flood plain. We will see.
Even if they reach shelter, evacuees may get an unpleasant surprise, as some did here in S.A.
The evacuees, many of them with medical needs, arrived at Blossom Athletic Center at 12:30 a.m. and were forced to wait more than two hours for help to arrive.
The evacuees said there was no food, water or basic medical necessities at the shelter.
"I was shocked to get here to find nobody to help us. They knew we were coming," said one evacuee.
The evacuees said they were told the Red Cross and other authorities were alerted to their arrival, but a Red Cross official said the agency was not aware that evacuees with medical needs were headed to the athletic center.
The storm hasn't even come ashore yet and already some cracks in the emergency planning are showing. The possibility of hundreds of thousands being trapped in their vehicles on freeways during a hurricane is not a pleasant one. Neither is the chance of a replay of crowded, unsupervised and unsupplied shelters. Lastly, I've seen no real indication that the risk of widespread serious flooding from San Antonio up to Austin and maybe even up to Dallas has figured into FEMA plans. They seem to be focussed entirely on the coastal strip.
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