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Okay. First off, as many of you may or may not know, Rita was headed directly for the Galveston area as of Tuesday, Sept 20th. My family and I made plans to leave, as she was a Cat. 3 Hurricane, and still had time to strengthen even more.


MY EVACUATION STORY

So, Wednesday, we went to the store, and made that ready. We moved items back, took the registers and emptied them, etcetc. Taped up the windows and we headed home.

We boarded up the windows at our place, and basically made everything as ready as we possibly could before falling asleep. My father worked himself into a heat exhaustion period from boarding up the windows in around 100 degree Farenheit (40 degree Celcius). The boards that would supposedly fit our windows (that we had to have premade before we could move into the house 10 months ago) didnt work. there was no way to attach them. We had to go buy more wood and drill them into the stuco.

But that wasnt the worst of it.

We had made plans to get up to dallas.

The next morning, we got up at 4am, finished loading the cars, made the animals as comfortable as possible, and was out the door by 5, an hour before the set evacuation time for the section I was in.

We went out, got on FM 528, and flew down to I45. We ran around 60ish down I45 until we reached Beltway 8. >< Traffic almost went to a standstill. By this time it was about... 5:30ish.

10:30 we had to let the dog out or she would explode. We had barely passed the 610 loop, some.... 15 or 20 miles from the beltway. OkayOkay... about... 3 to 4 miles an hour. I could handle that, sorta.

12:30, we stopped two overpasses down to get some lunch out in the heat. got back in the car, and kept goin.

7pmish, my gas tank is down to 3/8th of the tank, so we get off I45 and start looking for gas, and some dinner. We find dinner, but no gas, and hop back on the Freeway.

11:00pm. Tank down to a quarter of a tank after sitting in traffic (with my engine off, btw) We get off and look again for some gas. Dont find any, and we're getting too tired to move on. By this time, we've passed the other side of 610 Loop, but havent even reached the other side of the highway 8!!

11:30pm We pull over to a parking lot and try to rest for a little while.

1:30am My father wakes me up and we get back on the road. Meaning, I'm driving again with less than 2 hours of sleep. Traffic is still at a standstill. Thinking fast, my father heads for the Hardy Toll Road, and we get on that to bypass some of the traffic on I45.

3:30am. We're on the feeder of I45, stop and go traffic, but mostly it was stop. Finally my father pulls off the road ahead of us, and comes back and tells me that my mother is calling for help. We're at an 8th of the tank (mine was actually a bit below), there's no gas anywhere, and the storm was going to roll in that night. we didnt want to try and weather it out in our cars... thats just plain idiotic. She woke up our old bishop, the stake presdient of where we were (the Woodlands, btw) and he in turn woke up several more bishops and gave us directions to the stake center, where someone could help us.

4:30am. We get to stake center and take care of the animals, before getting a little shut eye before our help arrives.

6am We are let into the building, where we will take shelter. After unpacking a bit, and making up some "chair beds" we fell asleep for a few hours

10am We got up, got some breakfast, and then the drivers headed out to see if we could get some of the rationed gas that came in. We sat in line for two hours, halfway pushing our cars ro try and conserve gas in case they ran out, and finally got to actually fill up! ^^

We spent the rest of the day playing with the animals, and the other kids that came into the building for shelter, trying not to worry about the storm that was bearing down on us.



MY RANT ABOUT HOUSTON

Okay... I can expect traffic when evactuaing a city, right? I mean everyone could. We were expecting it to take a bit longer than the 4 and a half hours it usually takes us to get to Dallas.

However.

20 hours of driving time. 20 hours. Guess how far we got. Seriously. 50 miles from the store we run. 60 miles from home. That 10 mile difference was headed east, so it didnt put us any farther from the storm. 20 hours. to get 50 more miles from the coast where the 3rd strongest Storm on record was going to hit.

at 12:30, I45 opened up its Contra Lanes,(turning southbound lanes into northbound lanes) north of the woodlands. First mistake. After 20 hours of driving... we didnt even get that far. We were 2 miles shy of getting there. but that 2 miles would have worn out the last of our fuel supply, and we would have had to face the storm head on in a car. It didnt even help lessen the traffic at first!! >< Two hours later, the Contra Lanes opened on I-10 and that helped them out!! They kept saying so on the news. They should have opened the contra lanes before the City. Down in Friendswood, Galveston even, where the evactuations were mandatory!

Second. They had absolutely no gas coming into the stations. Once you were out, you were screwed. Every single station was empty. To get any, you had to be in the right place at the right time, cause by the time they told you where it was on the news, it was gone. People were parking at the pumps to rest and wait until gas came. But it never did.

Third, they kept saying "oh the evacuation is going so smoothly" "the contra lanes on I-45 should start helping to thin out traffic soon" blah blah blah. All of it was bullshit. My family and I sat for 20 hours on the Freeway where things were going so smoothly. Tensions were high, we were tired, dehydrated, and frsutrated.

Fourth, they should have had officers all over the highway, on all the onramps, not allowing people on. It should have been that way, because of all the people that waited for hours to get to a certain point. But no. There were people who just decided to skip around it and get on the damn highway when they thought they needed to.

Fifth, they lied to US!! They said they had several gas trucks on the way to help those on the roads. They said they had like 50 or 60!! >< They had 2. And those two couldnt really get into town cause of how ******** up the road system was. >< They lied about a whole lot more s**t, but dont get me started.





Thankfully! We found a place to stay the storm out, not as far as we had wanted, but it was safe. Thankfully! traffic did eventually thin out so that people could get out. Thankfully! Some people that werent leaving but were close to the highway came out to help the people stranded on the highways. Thankfully! Gas did eventually get brought in to a few stations to help get people where they were going. Thankfully! the storm turned north of us and the people that were stranded didnt have to face the threat of the eyewall.




Houston had better wake the ******** up. They could have killed millions from their lack of planning, and done a hell of a lot more damage with the cars that would have been thrown by winds that strong. The officials had no idea what they were doing, obviously, and I can almost guarentee they wont ever have to deal with another Hurricane Evacuation process. Unless we get another before November.