< Katrina's Impact on my Family's Life | Main
No Gas and No Police Help
2005 Hurricane Season -- Your Thoughts, Messages and Stories Blog
by Special Editorial
Monday September 26, 2005
No Gas and No Police Help
Tuesday morning at school while attending Lamar University I discovered there was a significantly large hurricane coming towards Texas and it seems that Beaumont was directly in the middle of the projected path. My roommate and I blew off the warnings thinking it wouldn't be as bad as everybody said it would, but thursday morning we turned on the television and discovered that this was a very big deal. Hurricane Rita: Category 4 was headed straight for us and we decided we should get our behinds on the road. I did not really take the time and look but I only had a 1/2 of tank of gas; however, this should have been enough to make it to Austin.
We left our apartment and discovered that I-10 was already backed up as far as Port Arthur. We followed the feeder roads all the way to Highway 124 and turned on that. We managed to avoid all the traffic from Beaumont all the way to Winnie, Texas. We got on I-10 in Winnie westbound and the traffic wasn't necessarily all that bad yet. We made it to the east side of Houston and that was where we met the resistance. We were bumper to bumper for about 3 hours until we made it to the HOV lane. We got on it thinking it might take us through Houston a little faster, and to our prevail it even ended up emptying right into the eastbound lane on I-10.
This was right when it opened and I thanked God for the luck we had received thus far into the journey. After we got about 10 miles outside of Houston on the eastern side we met the bumper-to-bumper traffic we were so whole-heartedly trying to avoid. We started running really low on gas so I began pulling into ever exit I could even though this was all taking place at speeds of less that 2 mph.
We made it to Colombus when the car started sputtering so we got off the interstate there. As soon as we met the road that ran through the town we were directed by a police officer to get at the end of the line which went about a mile down the road to get gas. Well we waited in this line for a period of about 12 hours and the reason it took this long is because police officers were ordering everybody to get into this one lane and there were other people getting into the lane next to us and cutting in at an intersection that POLICE were actually trying to control. This was a problem though. They were directing people to get in one lane and letting people budge into this lane. We were moving the rate of about 1 block every 2 hours.
I finally decided to wake up my roommate and go check out this situation. The police were sitting in their cars not doing anything and when I went up to one and asked what the situation is I received the answer "We are looking out for our own safety now. We are being threatened by people because they don't believe we are directing traffic the proper way." However maddening this was I just walked on in my rage not showing any amount of it.
I walked up to the gas station and things were tremendously out of control. They had 4 pumps designated to people filling up any canister they could muster (water containers, milk cartons, even oil pans) full of gas and bringing it back to their cars. As soon as I discovered this (about 10 hours into the wait), I found two canisters in the car and waited in line to fill up. I managed to fill up about 4 gallons of gas in containers and brought it back to the car which was still about 2 blocks away. After putting 4 gallons of gas in my car, we headed east as far as we could go and found a gas station 4 miles up the road that had hardly any people waiting for gas. (What a coincidence!) After a 23 hour trip we finally made it to our destination. I hope the next evacuation in Texas is a more successful and organized one.
Monday September 26, 2005 | # | comments (0)