Charlyn: The Tables Turn:
What a difference a week can make. Just Saturday, we were saying goodbye to family as they left Houston to return to the New Orleans area and what was left of their lives. We returned to normal for a few days, with an eye on the latest threat in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Rita.
Yesterday started normally, getting our son, Tyler, off to daycare. But instead of going to work, my husband Gary and I headed out to a store to stock up on supplies in case we were caught in the storm. We bought water and canned goods, but had no luck finding simple things like batteries and flashlights. Gas lines were already long, and ATMs were either out of cash or had long lines as well. The sign on the credit card scanner at the grocery store read, "Absolutely no cash back!!"
Still, we figured we'd be OK. Our house in Sugar Land, a suburb southwest of Houston, is not in a flood zone. We're about 75 miles off the coast. Plus, I had the "benefit" of hearing about the effects wind damage from the Category 5 hurricane that hit New Orleans, Katrina. It seems that the wind did the most damage to homes that were in the open. My parent's house, on a corner, suffered the most damage on the exposed side. My mother-in-law lost her columns and front porch. Yet my sister's house, surrounded on three sides by other buildings, came through pretty well; they only lost their rainspouts and gutters.
Our house is fairly protected, in a pie-shaped wedged amid four other homes. The trees on our lot are big, but not big enough to crush the house if they fell.
So last night, Gary went upstairs to read a bedtime story to Tyler, and I turned on the 10:00 news to catch the latest on the storm. The picture had changed dramatically. The storm, already a Category 5, was maxing out at 175 miles per hour sustained winds, and might go higher. This was clearly the strongest storm I'd ever seen in a lifetime of living on the Gulf Coast. The prediction in our area was for 100+ winds over a period of 7-9 hours, which the meteorologist noted, "is about when structures start to break down." If there was a Category 6, he said, this storm might get there.
That scared me. I pulled Gary out of Tyler's room to discuss what to do. We decided to pack what we needed and try to get out. I called my grandmother and aunt, both of whom evacuated here from New Orleans (and didn't want to leave again), and convinced them to go. We were all going to meet at my other aunt's house and caravan.
While Tyler slept, we went quietly and quickly through the house, gathering pictures and important papers, stowing food in bags, packing clothing. An hour later, we had a pile of boxes and suitcases waiting at the door. The phone rang. My aunt and grandmother couldn't make it to my other aunt's house to meet us; the two miles of highway they had to navigate was completely gridlocked. We turned the news back on and scoured the Internet. The news was the same throughout the Houston area: every highway was a parking lot.
We had a difficult, at times agonizing, conversation after that. What to do? It was midnight. If we left anyway, we risked sitting on a highway or country road, running out of gas, the car overheating, facing gas shortages. If we stayed, our house may not hold in the storm. The decision would have been hard enough if it were just the two of us, but we had our son and other family members to consider too.
In the end, we decided to stay another night. We went to sleep for a few hours. My nightmares were of all of us, hiding from the windows in the master bedroom closet, away from windows, listening to the roof give way and watching the walls crack.
I woke up before my alarm went off this morning at 5:00 am and turned the news back on. Traffic was still gridlocked. Families were pushing their cars down the highway to conserve gas. I was so frustrated at the public officials, who kept bragging that Houston was more equipped to deal with this emergency than an other city in the country. Where, I thought, was contraflow? In the largest peacetime evacuation in history, when four million people have to leave in only two directions, how can they let the gridlock go on for so many hours?
Slightly more heartening was the storm's shift overnght. Rita took a jog to the east, putting us on the western side of the storm. It had not intensified any more from last night. And city officials finally announced some plans for contraflow.
We've decided for now to ride out the storm in our house, and are trying to talk our other family members into joining us here. Of course, we keep getting worried calls from our family members back in the New Orleans area, still traumatized from Katrina.
