Dear friends and family,
It’s come to the point where it feels like I must be making all this stuff up. I think Lillie and I have reached a place far beyond “overwhelmed”.” Unreal is the closest word for it.
We’ve spent today in Baton Rouge, awaiting the arrival of Rita. Well before the storm made landfall (in fact, as I write this at 9.08pm, it has yet to make landfall) we were feeling her effects. Because the storm’s track has moved steadily eastward, much to our chagrin, Baton Rouge is now in an unfortunate location. We’re unlikely to get really high winds (gusts up to 80mph are predicted) and we may not even get flooding rain, but we’re in the tornado alley which develops in the front right quadrant of hurricanes.
Around 10am today we had a house meeting about tornado preparedness. The safest room here is an inside bathroom with no windows, so we’ve designated that our tornado shelter. We stocked it with torches, water, a wind-up radio, pillows, bedspreads and our shoes (in case the house got demolished and we had to exit through rubble) and then set up a roster to monitor the TV/radio. When a tornado approaches, they interrupt broadcasts with a blaring klaxon and flashing screen and then announce when you can expect a tornado in your area. Not long after we’d made our preparations, we got the first tornado warning. We had a good 15 minutes to make sure everyone was ready to get into the shelter. Charlie stood at the door looking out to the east, where they’d predicted the tornado to come from. Helen continued to make salmon loaf while keeping an ear out (approaching tornadoes sound like very loud oncoming trains), while Lillie and I made sure the shelter was all set up. Fortunately, no tornado eventuated. However, the stress on top of our existing stress was fairly hard to take. We’ve set up a tornado watch for the night, just in case, too.
Today, though, was entirely mild in comparison to yesterday when we evacuated from Houston. That was nothing short of brutal.
We got up at 1.30am and completed the preparations we’d begun the day before. We packed most things in our car; those things we left we shoved into our big walk-in closets and closed the doors. By the time we’d done that and showered, it was 2.45am and we hit the road, hoping that the traffic wouldn’t be too bad at that hour.
Oh my, how naïve! We had a free run onto the 610 loop (the giant ring road which circles Houston) and then immediately hit traffic which was almost at a dead standstill. We’d decided to go east to Baton Rouge, even though the authorities were saying “Do not go east. Louisiana is incapable of taking any refugees.” But we had decided it was a better option, with the current Cat 5 storm track heading straight for Galveston and Houston.
So we needed to jump onto the I10 freeway, but were suffering the dangerous handicap of trying to evacuate without local knowledge. If anything’s designed to ratchet up your stress level, it’s trying to evacuate from an unknown city. This is compounded by Houston’s almost permanent road construction and the city’s habit of removing all useful road signage during that construction. So, the I10 exit was not marked at all. All the locals know this; we didn’t. We passed it by and it wasn’t until I saw the number on the next two exits, 12 then 13, that I realised we’d missed our exit 11. Going that extra mile to exit 13 probably cost us almost 1 ½ hours. When we realised our mistake, we jumped off the 610, got directions from some helpful people at a petrol station (already out of petrol), and headed in the other direction.
Once on I10, we had a period of 10 minutes travelling 60mph, and then ground to a near-standstill once more.
From then on, we proceeded at a snail’s pace for much of the trip. The first 8 hours had added stress because they announced on the radio that those heading east on I10 would be forced north at Beaumont and not allowed to turn east towards Louisiana. Not knowing local roads, we had no idea whether there were other possible routes and we were amazed that there were no information signs whatsoever on any of the Texas roads (every town in Louisiana had a hurricane update and road info sign). When we finally got to Beaumont, they’d started allowing people to turn east, much to our relief.
It took us 10 hours to reach the Louisiana border, 100 miles from Houston. We had hoped it would take us 8 hours to do the trip all the way from Houston to Baton Rouge, usually a 4 ½ hour run if you go straight through.
By the time we got to Lake Charles, about 40 miles into Louisiana, the temperature had reached its predicted record high of around 101F. In the car, it was well over that because we had to keep the air conditioning turned off to conserve fuel. We kept the windows open to catch a small breeze.
It was a hard job driving, because we were both completely exhausted even before having to evacuate, but the really hellish job was being the passenger, because that was the side of the car where the sun was beating down. While Lillie was driving, I fell asleep just past the Louisiana border. I was asleep for maybe 20 minutes, and when I woke up I realised I was seriously overheated. We had plenty of water with us, but we hadn’t been drinking too much because we didn’t want to have to stop to go to the loo. I started drinking more, but by this time even the ice water remaining in our insulated bottles was warm, and the rest of our water was hot. I was so hot I think I was on the verge of heat stroke, and poor Lillie was scared I was going to lose consciousness. At this point the traffic was moving sometimes no more than 10 car lengths in an hour, sometimes as much as 5 miles per hour. The breeze was almost negligible and I had to get cooler, so we closed my window and jammed a pillow case in it to give me some shade.
There was no help to be had. All the others in this miserable procession were in the same boat, and we hadn’t seen a single police car or state trooper patrolling the route on the whole trip (we finally saw one about 20 miles before we reached Baton Rouge). Fortunately, we came across an off ramp at a little place called Iowa and found a petrol station which not only had fuel, it also had cold drinks. No cold water -- that was all sold out, and the sugary drinks available were undrinkable. But I bought a whole pile of them while Lillie stayed in the queue for petrol, and we rolled the cold bottles on our foreheads and cooled ourselves down that way. We could also get into the shade and go to the loo. The place was a madhouse, with hundreds of people pouring into it. The people behind the cash registers did a wonderful job and kept undercharging people who didn’t have enough money for what they needed. Most of the evacuees were amazing, too, being cooperative and helpful, despite almost all being very physically distressed. Even people who had come from Lake Charles, about 10 miles away, were already dehydrated and dispirited, as it had taken them about 3 hours to cover that distance. Despite that, people had a camaraderie and compassion for one another. In the line to the loos, the women were passing along a huge roll of toilet paper, because it was the only one in the place, and so they were making sure everyone got some before they entered the loos.
After we got petrol at Iowa, we closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning. That was a huge relief. And then, about another 5 miles on, the road suddenly cleared as a whole pile of people took one of the exits to the north. We then got to drive at around 70mph for almost half an hour, before hitting gridlock at the next town, Lafayette. After Lafayette, there was more bumper to bumper stuff, then a really good run through the Atchafalaya Basin until we hit the outskirts of Baton Rouge, where things once again slowed to a 5mph crawl.
We reached Maryann and Charlie’s place at a little before 8pm, welcomed with showers and a gin and tonic and food and embraces. Seventeen hours for the trip.
It’s hard to describe how desperate the trip was. Our extreme exhaustion when we started out made us both concerned about having to evacuate at all. Once we realised how gruelling the trip was going to be, it was a matter of grinding it out, staying focused while driving, trying to keep the driver awake when it was our turn to be passenger. For a lot of the time early on we listened to the radio so we’d know what Rita was doing. But when it became clear that the storm, travelling at 9mph, was going a lot faster than we were most of the time, it became too hard to listen. Those short minutes when we got to travel at 60 or 50 or even 25mph were wondrous, and each time I could feel my body chemistry shifting, as the adrenaline-fuelled urge to flight was given momentary satisfaction.
Of course, now that we’re safe in Baton Rouge (well, not safe, given the tornado situation, but certainly much more comfortable), we realise that once again we were two of the fortunate ones. Those who went west or north from Houston, to places like Dallas or Austin or (as we had originally planned) Wichita Falls, were on the roads for far longer. One of my workmates, Carolyn, rang us and said her grandson took 32 hours to do the usually 4-hour trip from Houston to Austin. At one point, he waited in a line for petrol for three hours, and when he was 20 cars from the front, the service station ran out of fuel. Late this afternoon, there were still people sitting on the roads out of Houston, most of them having run out of petrol and unable to move, with Rita looming ever closer. Some of Lillie’s colleagues are still in Houston, having got no further than a few miles in several hours and deciding leaving town was a lost cause.
The night before we left, the officials of Houston and Texas had been on TV saying “You won’t get a repeat of New Orleans” and “We are the best prepared place in the country for this type of disaster”. From my perspective, New Orleans’ pathetic excuse for an evacuation plan was infinitely superior to Houston’s. When the traffic chaos manifested, the Houston officials started saying how they were surprised, and that they were prepared for a Cat 3 storm and the evacuation of maybe 500,000 people. I assume that means that for a bigger storm they just expected people to suffer through it. They had no comprehensive contraflow plans (turning inbound lanes of traffic outbound so people evacuating could use both sides of the road) and couldn’t even tell people where contraflow would be available. In New Orleans, everyone had been given contraflow maps before the start of hurricane season.
More unforgivable in my book was the way people were just dumped onto the evacuation routes. There were no mobile refuelling tankers, no emergency water stops or port-a-loos or food places. And this, despite the recent lessons of Katrina, despite the area suffering record highs for the past two weeks, despite government at all levels saying “We’re ready for Rita”.
I don’t know what sort of damage the storm will do when it hits tonight or early morning, but there have already been hundreds of thousands of victims of this disaster, those who were tortured on the roads out of Houston. Every person I’ve talked to who evacuated, including our friend Judith who drove 13 hours by herself into Louisiana, has a tone of intense suffering in their voices. I think people will look at the pictures on TV and think, “It must have been horrible being in that gridlock”, but I’m sure for most people who endured it, it was way beyond horrible.
What’s really remarkable is the patience and generosity and friendliness of almost everyone on the road, with a very few exceptions. Humans really are remarkable.
The final irony, of course, is that while we were on the road the storm took a more easterly track. We may well have been better off staying in Houston, now on the “good” side of the storm, than being in Baton Rouge. Still, the decision was the best one we could make given the information at the time.
I better finish this off. We’ve just heard a couple of transformers explode in the distance, so the power not last for much longer. We’re getting lots of rain and some solid gusty wind. I’m so tired, I’ll probably sleep through anything that comes.
Lots of love,
Rose
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