Notes on Evacuation

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, September 29, 2005
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After a twenty-eight hour flight from a hurricane that didn't come close to my neighborhood in the first place, I'd like to think I've learned something. Hurricane Rita missed my home only to swing east and devastate my home town, Lake Charles. The damaged airport there, which received a lot of early coverage, is just a couple of miles from my old house. So for what it's worth, allow me to pass along some advice in case you ever find yourself in similar circumstances:

1. Don't fall for the hype. A lot of people evacuated from Houston who didn't have to. They didn't live in mandatory evacuation zones, but they took no comfort in the way that local officials, when asked whether people in Cypress or Kingwood should evacuate, said that everyone needed to decide that question for himself. Frank Billingsley, the Channel 2 weatherman, tried to bring some sanity to the situation by advising people outside of mandatory evacuation zones to weather the storm in place, but the damage was done. The reluctance to nip post-Katrina panic in the bud was understandable, but it resulted in a lot more cars on the road than needed to be there -- especially when you consider how many areas south of Houston were being evacuated through Houston. Laurie and I wanted to weather the storm at home, but the rest of our family wanted to leave and wanted us to come with them. So we did.

2. Don't take more than one vehicle. Convoys travel much slower than lone rangers, and take a lot longer to re-fuel. Plus, if you have to take to the backroads and navigate by instinct, your convoy will crumble. Our family convoy fared well at first, having decided to travel east instead of north on the impossibly-gridlocked 45, but at the first bit of traffic we were separated. During the first leg of our evacuation -- an eight hour crawl from Houston to Beaumont -- we didn't see any of the three other vehicles in our convoy. Not once. After refueling in Beaumont at lunchtime, everyone else in our convoy, after hearing that the course of the storm had changed, decided to turn back. Laurie and I proceeded, though. I'd put my hand to the plow and wasn't going to turn back.

3. Don't take the biggest vehicle you have. I saw lots of SUVs on the road, packed to the gills with prized possessions. Inching forward at the rate of fifteen minutes or half an hour per mile destroys any hopes you have of fuel economy. We took the MINI Cooper S, which averages 35 mpg on the highway, and it made less than 15 mpg on the gridlocked highways north of Beaumont. Imagine how the vehicles that get less than 15 mpg on a good day were faring! Travel light. I know that's difficult advice in these circumstances, and not everyone has the luxury of taking it. But if you do, then count yourself blessed.

4. Don't shelter in the crisis zone. We reached the Lufkin area well after dark and decided to skirt the city entirely. All its shelters were packed and the gasoline shortage had reached Lufkin hours before. At that point, I had been driving non-stop since 3:30 in the morning, but there was no way I was going to stop still in the crisis zone, which would amount to stranding myself. I told Laurie there was no way I would stop until we reached gas stations without lines, with bottled water on the shelves, and every grade of fuel in stock.

5. Don't trust what you hear on the news. Finding yourself in the middle of a crisis like this will hone your cynicism about national news networks. North of Beaumont, drivers stuck in traffic could tune in the broadcast from local CBS affiliate Channel 6 and get accurate, relevant information about the gridlock on 69 and 96, about plans for contra-flow lanes, and about the hurricane's expected course. We discovered that everything we'd been told back in Houston had now changed and it was Port Arthur and Lake Charles in the crosshairs, not Galveston. But when the affiliate broke away to the CBS Evening News, the national anchor spent half an hour dispensing outdated information about a Galveston landfall -- presumably because Galveston is where they'd shot all their footage earlier in the day! Thanks CBS.

6. Don't fall asleep on the road. We finally reached an open highway that took us from Henderson up to Paris, Texas. Gas stations were open and clean, but I still topped off whenever possible. After hours and hours of unsteady crawling, we could finally set the cruise control at seventy and cover some ground. From the start, our destination was Tulsa, Oklahoma, which may seem like evacuation overkill until you consider that the folks in the hotel room across the hall from us were from Lake Charles. By three in the morning, I'd been driving non-stop for twenty-four hours -- an all-time record for me. I would have been proud except that I was having these mild hallucinations -- black, blurry animals running into the road -- and I kept waking up without remembering that I'd fallen asleep. I remembered the Spirtfire pilots in the Battle of Britain who'd taken benzedrine to stay awake, and if I'd had any I would probably have done likewise. (Come to think of it, though, I'm not exactly sure what benzedrine is.) We turned on an audiobook -- Zadie Smith's On Beauty -- and that helped quite a bit. Eventually, though, somewhere on the Oklahoma turnpike, I pulled over and let Laurie drive that last hour or so into Tulsa.

7. Don't congratulate yourself. Despite the long journey, things went well for us. We never ran out of gas -- in fact, we had some rather fortunate experiences at the pump, including an episode in Jasper, Texas where I managed to pump a full tank of gas after the station lights were turned off and the owner declared the tanks were empty. Still, after such a time, Laurie and I were in no doubt about who to thank for our relatively clean run (and the fact that, after all this trouble, our house back in Houston was spared from the storm). There were things that happened during this trip that seems providential, and a couple that seemed downright miraculous. We didn't fare well because we made good choices. Plenty of people did that and still experienced hardship. All I can say is, to God be the glory.

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The evacuation in the face of Rita was apparently the largest of its kind in our history. In spite of the futility, I'm glad we made the journey and experienced it all first-hand. Our only regret is that, in spite of having a camera in the back seat, we didn't take any pictures. If we had to do it again, I think we would. For more on the Bertrand family evacuation, including the shocking news that Laurie contemplated bringing her sewing machine with her, check out Part 1 of her Rita memoir.