I’m starting to get the feeling that I should have just created a category called “Hurricane” and then set up “Katrina” and “Rita” as sub-categories, because it looks like we are in for a future of a lot (bevy, gaggle, horde?) of major hurricanes hitting areas where I have a lot of friends and family.
My wife has several family members in the area southeast of Houston. Her father and step-mother have already evacuated most of the patients and workers (and some of their families) from the nursing home they own to College Station. Her step-mother wisely rented two school buses very early on, and also rented a horse trailer for moving supplies.
My wife’s brother siphoned gas out of every gas powered engine on his property and managed to head out early this morning with 38 gallons of gas. He left at 2:30 am from Angleton and managed to get to College Station by 5 am by driving on route 290. Although news reports said 290 was also completely backed up, he said he saw relatively little traffic at the time he drove. I know that at some point yesterday the Texas Highway Patrol started opening both sides of the highways for people who were evacuating. There was a ridiculous photo in the Oakland Tribune today showing a cop pulling over a driver for driving the wrong way on a completely deserted Interstate, while the other side of the road was a veritable parking lot. While you end up with some traffic issues if there were some vehicles trying to get back into Houston, I think those problems aren’t nearly as bad as having hundreds of cars left stranded on the highway because the cars ran out of gas.
This actually happened to my sister-in-law’s brother’s ex-wife. She was driving in a car behind his when she ran out of gas. Fortunately, she and their son were able to transfer to his car and keep going, but they had to leave her car behind.