Note: this was written during the day 8-26-2020. Hurricane Laura made landfall around 2 a.m. on 8-27-2020. We, thankfully, were spared anything, but it has decimated Louisiana and far eastern southeast Texas.
Well, here I sit in Friendswood Texas, waiting on Hurricane Laura to make landfall sometime this evening. If you don’t recognize the name, we’re a little bedroom city between Galveston and Houston, on the west side of I-45. We’re about 5 minutes from NASA Johnson Space Center.
We were under a voluntary evacuation but we’re staying put. Thankfully this will mostly miss us so they lifted the evac for us. We rode out Ike and Harvey here and we’re golden. Harvey was the big one, 52 inches of rain in our neighborhood.
The water came halfway up our driveway but didn’t rise further. We got damage to our floors through the shingles that lifted. We were very, very lucky. My son, who was a volunteer firefighter back then, spent 4 days in a boat, pulling people out of flooded homes.
Laura isn’t going to be a Harvey, it’s high, just hit Category 4, but it’s going fast and isn’t going to dump as much rain. This one’s a wind storm with some serious storm surge. Storm surge is when the wind pushes the gulf water into the land. That surge, with this storm, can be up to 40 miles inland. It’s going to be upwards of 20 FEET deep. That’s two stories of a house. That’s a bad thing, sweeps off anything in its path, including houses.
Hurricane Rita was a similar storm. It hit Sept 8 in this same area, the Sabine river/Port Arthur/Lake Charles area. Because Hurricane Katrina had hit a mere 2 weeks prior, and how that storm turned into a massive flood event due to the levees breaking, people were nervous of another storm.
Right up until the landfall, people were sure it was going to hit Houston. And THAT is what started the whole story. I published this on my personal Facebook post today, with some additions here.
No Shit, there I was….
It’s been 15 years. This week, 15 years ago we loaded up the van and two cars. Two friends, April, Michael and we took stuff to bug out for Hurricane Rita. Three cats, one dog, and all my important books and computer equipment got loaded. Angus (our dog) went in the van with Bruce and the stuff. April and I took the cats in her car, and Dancer Mike had his car with his stuff.
We were some of the last people out, our area was on the “Cat 4” move list, we were supposed to pull out about 10 a.m. It’s supposed to be staggered so that we move the most vulnerable (Galveston, the folks around Clear Lake and the bay) go first and then the others are supposed to go when their turn comes.
In a good design, the authorities open up the tollways, the high occupancy vehicle lane, and the opposite direction roads all going the same way, out of the city into the rest of Texas. That’s called Contraflow. People who were in evacuation areas would get on the roads and go out to San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston.
By theory.
As a wise 19th century Prussian military commander, Helmuth von Molke, put it, “ No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The new statement, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Well, it’s not the new way, that was written in a 1786 Scottish poem by Robert Burns.
In practice, what came to be known as ‘The Great Rita Bug-Out” was a cluster-fuck (no other way to put that, sorry). After the stuff we saw in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Alabama and Mississippi two weeks before, people were understandably spooked about Rita.
And oh, this wasn’t good. By the time it was our time to go, I-45 north from Galveston to Dallas was a parking lot. I-10 to San Antonio was also. And even 290 to Austin were all just moving less than 5 miles per hour, if they moved at all. We discussed it and decided that the better part of valor was to go around most of the BS and just go south for a while, then up.
We have friends from CMA who lived in Killeen and they had insisted we come to them. Carolynn was awesome in that invite because it was not just the four of us and pets, it was also three adult friends, one with her grandkids who had come because their family’s stuff was in Katrina and they needed shelter. So it was a big group heading up there. Our friends were living across the highway and they decided to leave sooner (they were in a different time-frame to leave) and go up I-45.
Now, remember, this was before the entire world had cell phones. None of us had one. I had the little 2-way radios we used at the camping events, Dancer and Bruce got those. If something was going on, the boys could stop and since we were in the car between them, we would stop too.
Omg, this is where the cluster comes in. We made our way out and didn’t hit traffic until Lake Jackson. They were moving too and we got into their traffic into Brookshire. That got thicker as little towns and such emptied to get out. By the time we got to Brenham, it was traffic nightmare times a thousand.
We stopped on the south side of 290 to consult the maps (remember, no google maps at that point) and try to figure out the way out without getting on the highway. Bruce was in front, we were in the middle with Dancer on the back. The boys bailed out and came up to the car so we all could talk.
Suddenly, Bruce starts yelling and running for the van. It was moving, backing up. Before he could catch it, it rolled back right into the car. Not hard enough to screw them up but enough. Bruce got the door open and Angus, our 80-pound border collie had decided that since dad wasn’t in the van, it was his turn to drive. He got into the driver’s seat and hit the shifter, rolling the van backward. Since he didn’t have a license, Bruce got him out of the seat and got back in.
We decided to cross over 290 and go past the college, taking off on farm roads to I-35 into Killeen. We got a bit lost, stopped a college guy who told us what road to take and we were off again. Somewhere near College Station, we began to run out of gas. We started looking for a station but everything was either closed or had no gas. This was a big problem. We finally found a non-attended station where you had to use a credit card for the gas, no one was there to take cash.
At this point, I want to tell you what they were telling us to do. Take food, drink, clothing, medications, and cash. They tell us that we shouldn’t count on credit cards to use because the system would be down if the electricity was off. So all of us had cash. April had a card so we all filled on hers and paid her back later. There was a lady there who was in tears and begged us to let her fill up on April’s card, she would pay. She let the lady fill up.
We then we crossed the highway and went into the one restaurant, a pizza delivery chain store, to pick up some hot food. They were open, just cleaning up after having sold every single food thing in the store. The guy told us he didn’t have anything left.
So we got back into the vehicles and headed out to find El Dorado, or rather Killeen.
By this time, it was dark. We had been on the road for about 11 or 12 hours. We were going down little country roads, around fields. Someone said they thought they saw the scarecrow stalking the fields in a hockey mask with a big knife. Bruce was sure there was a t-rex stalking the scarecrow. Pitch black night. Driving in the country where there were very few houses. We felt very alone out there until we looked back and there was a long line of car headlights following US! They must have thought we knew where we were going, but we were literally doing the “out there that a-way is I-35 and Killeen. We will continue on this general direction, we’re bound to hit it sometime….maybe.”
Having finally found the highway, and it was thankfully clear and running at speed, we rolled into Killeen 17 hours after having left home. Our friends took 32 hours to get there. For us, that week was a vacation, they had a pool and we had great food and great visit with friends. We’re still grateful for that, so many weren’t so lucky.
There were people who went to Dallas, were on the road when this thing hit. They ran out of gas, food, and it was hotter than hell. Cars blew engines and a bus full of retirees caught fire and killed people. We knew of a couple of friends who decided to go east to get away because it looked like it was heading here. They were in Beaumont when this thing hit, not a good thing but they got through it.
All that happened when we got back was one corner of our house appears to have been “lifted,” jamming the fan in that room. And our fence was down. That’s it.
So this is where we are today, this one looks like Rita, going into the same place. Thankfully, this time Houston hasn’t jumped in their cars to leave. We’re staying. They have had mandatory evacuations in Galveston, Port Arthur, and most of the towns along the coast and Galveston Bay. A city near Clear Lake, which is connected to both Galveston Bay and Clear Creek, has also evacuated because of the possibility of flooding from the tidal surge. The wind is, as I’m writing this, starting to blow in gusts and we’ve had clouds off and on during the day. Rain is expected soon.
Rita has a bit part in my Fangs & Halos series, I got Marcus and Lilly, with Jesse, Isobel, Lancelot, and Baron to fly to San Antonio (Marcus has his own 737) and stayed at the Menger Hotel there. This starts in late Book 2, Marcus’s Vampire, and finishes up in Book 3, Vampire rEvolution. As with the Katrina chapters, everything in the Rita story are real, just with names changed and my fictional characters dropped into the story.
We’re staying. Waiting on the outer feeder bands of the hurricane to arrive and trying to keep calm. But the memories of 15 years ago are very strong with this storm.