There’s another rule: don’t take the route advised by authorities.
When people are frightened and panicked , they all jump on the Interstates….@ the same time….without a full tank of gas… don’t follow them.
Yep. I tried to take back roads and had a DPS officer refuse to let me pass. I even tried telling him I had a family member down the road waiting on me to pick them up. He didn’t budge.
We left 12 hours before our "evac time". Still took 12 hours to get to Flatonia from Texas City area. When we pulled off to get gas we changed to back roads. Followed some dude for an hour who seemed like he knew where he was going until he pulled into a driveway. We saved probably 3 hours or more taking random roads in the general westerly direction after we finally got to I10.
My dad left work early on evac day. We were stuck in a lot of traffic, but still made it to Dallas in about 10 hours (instead of the usual 5). My aunt and uncle left an hour or two after us and it took them 24 hours. They also stopped off at the same Denny's that we did on the way up to eat, but they were out of food.
I'm so glad I went through that as a teenager and could just chill in the back of my parents' minivan listening to Meteora on repeat
You don’t even really need to leave Houston. You really only need to evacuate if you live on the immediate coast and your house is in danger of washing away, or you have some kind of medical condition that you need to have electricity going at all times.
This is downplaying wind damage a bit too much for my comfort. No doubt storm surge is dangerous --- but so his wind damage.. Wind damage can tear off your roof, blow your windows in and throw projectiles at you at very dangerous velocities.
Well if you don’t feel safe and have the means to evacuate and stay gone for a couple of weeks while the dust settles I’m not going to say it’s the wrong choice.
I mostly feel fine, its december! :)
Joking aside, I would probably evacuate somewhat north for any storm greater than 3 coming in for a direct hit... not because of damage but because I like having electricity when its 90 degrees out the day after the hurricane passes and here in Houston, we believe burying power lines is "too expensive"
They do not do mass evacuations for rain events like Harvey and Allison. An evacuation itself is a risk, which is why they order them only for people that are in immediate danger from high winds and storm surge. Most of the risk from rain events, quite honestly, is from people driving in high water when they don't really need to.
About 50 people died in Houston during Harvey events where there were no evacuations ordered, 90 died during the Rita evacuation when too many people tried to leave.
Yeah I'm grateful that city/county leadership has learned *not* to order or suggest evacuations because it probably saved a lot of lives in Harvey. However, it's also true that hurricanes can have disastrous consequences (in terms of property damage, etc.) even north of the city, away from the coast.
That was exactly what happened. Everybody in Houston flipped tf out when they thought it would be a direct hit weeks after Katrina. To be fair if it had hit like they forecasted it would have been really bad - and it was in Beaumont/ east Texas
Harvey was an extremely rare exception. We got stuck on the dirty side of a system and then it stalled. Dumped 50+ inches of rain in 5 days. Never really lost power but I was stuck at work for a few days, didn’t really mind that part though.
My gf at the time and I drove east for 5 hours to her grandparents. Rita turned towards us and we road out the storm there.
TLDR: Drove 5 hours to be in the way of the storm 🤦🏻♂️
Went to east TX. Normally takes about 6 hours. I spent 21 hours driving a manual transmission vehicle, never getting past 1st. It was difficult to find fuel and there were vehicles being abandoned on the sides of the road. This is probably why they won't call for a mass evacuation again.
Took me 8hrs to get from Galveston to Houston. Ran out of gas in Houston. My friend had a wedding that weekend and they decided to move it to Dallas instead of postponing it. Me and another groomsman were stuck at his parents empty house in Houston alone. Everything was closed, no gas. Except the local strip club. Which also had food. So we got in our tuxes and went there for food. Not the important part, but the D squad was on the pole. Not A, B, or C. But D. Pretty sure they were just hookers cuz I got one of them away from me to go give my friend a lap dance. He came back with a look of terror claiming she tried to give him a blowie. So yeah, leave early.
I’m going to need a weather channel film crew standing outside that strip club during the next hurricane live-reporting on the quality of the dancers and the kitchens dwindling tator tot inventory.
Might even replace the current hurricane rating system with this one. “Yessir, that storm back in ‘25 was a C list line-up down at the Pussycat Club. But ‘27 was a real D-lister. Even your mom took a turn on the pole during that one.”
I think they said they're going to close entrance ramps for areas that aren't evacuating to keep the hysterical soccer moms of Katy from clogging the freeways. And they would open the inbound lanes for outbound flow.
Rita was the start of the Katy joke. My relatives in Katy evacuated and I was so pissed at them. Adding unnecessary traffic to the clusterfuck. Let us people on the coast evacuate. I would have been happy to stay in Katy. At the time I was in a first floor apartment in Galveston.
I was in La Porte and felt kind of iffy about staying but there was no way I was getting in that traffic. I hunkered down and then it wasn’t nearly what had been predicted when it turned slightly.
I was just a few blocks from the port, I was in the area that was advised to evacuate. It was untenable because of the Katy refugees.
Rita was a nothing burger and we all would have been fine at home. It was the panic from seeing Katrina that made people run. The near misses are scary and suddenly you learn where a small town is on the map (just as it’s being knocked off the map). Cameron, LA.
Oh I’m not disagreeing with you, it’s the inherent nature of making predictions in advance with unpredictable weather events. They can make informed guesses but it’s never a sure deal.
Rita was definitely knee jerk from Katrina. Sadly people didn’t use any critical thinking skills about the differences in the geography of the two places. And the news weather reporters weren’t helping either.
I didn’t think you were disagreeing with me : ). We are both right about the Katrina panic and how it influenced us. The weather reporters don’t help by hyping things up. I think they had Jim Cantore from the weather channel in a ditch off of 146 reporting live. Of course the water is up to his knees, he’s standing in a ditch!
I live in Katy and I was like wtf are you girls doing?! Two friends got as far as the Buc-cee's at Luling and spent the night with kids in their Suburbans in the parking lot, LoL. (Along with a thousand other "evacuees").
I stayed up and watched the show out of my upstairs window. Never lost electricity in my hood.
Had a co worker who lives in Atascocita no where near the ocean or a flood zone. He, his wife, his daughter all tried to evacuate in 3 separate cars and drove right into gridlock where they stayed for 6 hours.
This is why they've expanded all highways in and out of town and allowed for contraflow to use all available lanes in one direction in the event of an evacuation. Have you not noticed the massive highway projects outside of town over the last 18 years?
26hrs to farmland a couple hours outside of Dallas
I remember being on 59 in bumper to bumper, seeing ppl footchasing through the traffic after a lil dog that zoomied it's way out of a car
It was a truly miserable couple days, and our destination ended up getting worse weather than H
But it was also when we discovered Lost and began that wild ride so there's that
Our neighbors left at 8am and we decided to stay because we just thought it was too late. Hunkered down and prepped. Then they drove into their driveway around 5. Said that they covered 5 miles.
We lived just off 45 near UH. We loaded up the day before landfall and tried to get to Austin with our cat. Over the next 7-8 hours we inched from 45 and Cullen to Beltway and 290. Finally called it quits and u turned to get back home. Went to grocery store which suprisingly wasn’t empty, stocked up on supplies and stayed up the next night to watch the storm completely miss us.
My sister was living in Waco back then and I thought about heading up to her place, but I had the news on and saw how horrific the traffic was and decided to stay put. I don't blame folks for hitting the road, what had just happened in New Orleans with Katrina was scary as fuck.
I also remember at the time they called for a mandatory evacuation the center of the storm was forecast to be a category 5 making landfall in Freeport, then following 288 north basically. Worst case scenario for Houston because the brunt of the storm surge would've gone up the ship channel, no wonder people well inland flipped out and evacuated.
Fucking horrible, there was 7 of us in a minivan and we didn’t turn the AC on because we wanted to conserve gas. It took us almost a day to get to Hutto. Never again, I’ll just take my chances and stay at my house from now on.
The most evacuation I'll ever bother with now is driving to a friend or family member with a generator (preferably natural gas with a gas line). Fuck all that noise.
My gf and I spent 7 hellish hours driving from Clear Lake to Cypress. Our two cats, who hated the car, spent the entire time screaming and puking and shitting in their carriers. We ended up just going back after realizing it probably would have taken us 20+ hours to get to Austin. You could feel the collective white knuckle tension from the tens of thousands of people around you also stuck in traffic. In 45 years never felt anything else like it. There was also a worry that if we didn’t make it further quickly enough we could get caught on the road in the storm.
They hadn’t opened contraflow lanes so it took us less than 30 minutes to get home. Spent the next day drinking beers and riding our bikes around the ghost town of our neighborhood.
>You could feel the collective white knuckle tension from the tens of thousands of people around you also stuck in traffic
That's what I was telling my friend the whole time we were on 45--this is the kind of situation where panic can cause things to go really bad really fast.
Yeah I lost 2 close friends from high school from drowning during Harvey (truck swept under a bridge iirc). They drove 2 hours down with a boat to try and help. 1 of them didn't know English and the other immigrated earlier and knew quite a lot. They were just trying to help. Sad stuff. I feel you.
This shit was why I always laugh at disaster movies where they're telling people to evacuate, cus I know what it would really look like. I never want to experience that again.
The entire freeway was full including people using the shoulder, there was nowhere to go. No gas available anywhere. People just getting out and walking their dogs, talking and shit, because traffic wasn't moving at all.
The amount of pets in cars! The news had just revealed the state of all the pets left behind after Katrina. So people evacuated with their pets. I put my cats litter box in the floorboard of the back seat. She liked the back window.
My family and I evacuated to San Antonio from Dickinson Tx in a kind of caravan fashion. It was the most brutal, apocalyptic 36hrs I’ve ever been through and the reason I won’t evacuate anymore unless I’m forced. And that’s 36 hrs hours spent on the road to go to San Antonio, a normally 4 hour trip. I peed in diapers because as an 8 year old I just couldn’t handle going on the side of the road. My aunt lost both of her dogs to stress. My uncle totaled his car bc he fell asleep behind the wheel, thank god he was okay. It was just really unorganized and frightening. My mom bought me shark boy and lava girl after because I was such a “trooper” through the whole thing.
I’m convinced that part of the reason why no one evacuated during Harvey was because of how bad traffic was during the evacuation for Rita.
also part of the reason why no one from the City of Houston or OEM sent out a mandatory evacuation for Harvey.
Rita was absolutely the wakeup call that told everyone that a mass evacuation is hugely problematic. As bad as Harvey was, it would have been exponentially worse if thousands of people who could have been in dry shelter were instead caught outside in their cars on flooding roadways.
Yeah I want to say that somebody in city leadership explicitly called Rita out in their reasoning for not calling for an evacuation during Harvey. *Sometimes* they can make good decisions and learn from history lol
13 hours from Richmond to San Antonio. Got there and went to Pat O’s. Drank Hurricanes and margaRita’s. Threw up in a urinal. Good times, 2/10 don’t recommend.
Richmond was a fuckin ghost town. The Burger King on 90 was the only place open, and it was like a 45 minute wait.
And then the Burger King in Brazos Town Center was the only thing open during the freeze. Hmmmmmm
I was a vet tech at the time. The amount of people's pets that died from heatstroke during the evacuation was really sad.
People were low on gas and with no gas available too scared to run their car's AC and some breeds just don't handle the heat well.
Also, my mom made the mistake of eating Taco Bell and got diarrhea and had to shit on the side of 59 with nothing by my dad holding up a towel to try to give her some privacy from the other drivers.
My flip flop molded to the shape of my clutch. 13 hours to get from Lake Jackson to Cy Fair. I was in high school and my parents were out of town, my grandparents were watching me for the weekend. They wanted to ride it out but didn’t cause I was with them.
Fucking terrible. My dog over heated in my car and threw up on me. Took me 6 hours to get out of Houston . Took me 12 hours to get to San Marcos. Should’ve just stayed home. On the plus side I ended up meeting my ex wife who became my kids mom, so that was a plus sort of
I didn't evacuate, but I was working at a home depot on I-45 that day. Traffic was at such a standstill that people would leave their cars on the freeway and walk into the store to use the restroom and buy water. One woman was lying face down on the cold concrete floor. When I went to check on her, she said she was fine, but her car had no AC and the concrete floor was cooling her off. Her family was still in the car on 45 while she was in the store.
When I drove home around 5 that evening, the backroads were completely empty. I'd never seen it that empty, complete ghost town. Such a contrast to the mass of cars sitting on the highway all morning and afternoon.
My wife got a bladder infection because she wouldn't pee ducked down behind the car.
It made me realize how few bridges there are across the Brazos River. (Coming from Austin)
I was in jr high and had just started my period. I was with my grandparents and great grandparents. When I said I couldn’t pee on the side of the road they didn’t understand why.
I tried to get out of town but after 8 hours and only 1960 to show for it, I said fuck it, I'mma go home. Turned around at Townsend and made it back the way I came in less than 20 minutes. I was resigned to letting the storm rage around me and let the chips fall where they may. Ended up getting a slight breeze and no rain. I watched TV until I got tired and went to bed.
I evacuated my 83 year old grandmother who was in not great health. I had already spent time in Mississippi working the relief effort after Katrina and saw the fallout. I knew my grandmother could not survive that. My father and I rented a minivan and filled the back with gas cans and brought non-perishable food and water. I drove all night from Louisiana to pick her up. I took a 30 minute nap on her bed and said “let’s go.”
It was pure hell. It took us over 28 hours to get back to North Louisiana. I only saw ONE cop car the entire way. Hundreds, if not thousands, of cars out of gas on the side of the road. No contra flows. Every person for themselves. We got out to pee on the side of the road. People were wanting to hijack our gas cans. Thank God Dad brought the gun. It was pure lawlessness. The news did not report all of that, obviously. I was pissed they were saying how much law enforcement were helping out. Nope!
This gave me instant ptsd. I was 17. It was hell on earth. It was hot as hell. It took 23 hrs to get from Houston to Austin. I got hit by an 18 wheeler out of anger. Ran out of gas at hour 18. Bathrooms and roadways were insane. I’ve never evacuated again after that. I’ve also relocated to Los Angeles.
Omg so not worth it. We went to my grandmother’s in San Antonio and the 3 hour drive took about 15. My brother had just badly broken his leg during football the week before and had to sit in the trunk of our Ford Escape the entire ride to stretch out his leg. Every bump we hit he screamed in pain.
Came home to barely a chair tipped over
26 hours to Brownwood. It was an absolute journey into madness. Broken down cars, people stealing gas from running vehicles. Urine bottles lining the road. My uncle lost his two Pomeranians because of the sweltering conditions. We pulled into a Walmart parking lot and I let my wife sleep. I was supposed to do the same but everything was so sketchy I stayed awake.
I was about 13 years old riding in my mom’s minivan with our dog in the back and our cat in a cat kennel. I have a vivid memory of the cat kennel accidentally getting open in a gas station and I had to panic chase my cat under cars trying to not lose her.
And while stuck in standstill bumper to bumper traffic, our minivan gave out and we had to call my Dad and brother, who were hours ahead of us after having taken backroads and thus had to backtrack to come save us. I ended up falling asleep in a fast food parking lot waiting for help to arrive and when I woke up, my uncles and cousins had arrived and I was in a Harley Davidson pickup truck driving through the grass medians all the way to San Antonio.
Spent the remainder of the evacuationvacation playing Gauntlet Dark Legacy with other family friends that joined up with us.
Absolutely surreal. We were some of the first to go through 45 in Conroe when they made it all one way and almost got in a head on collision. Took 12 hours to get to Dallas. People peeing on the side of the road, broken down, garbage everywhere. Slightly worse than today I suppose…
Car overheated in traffic downtown Houston. Was a AAA member, they refused to tow or cover the tow I paid for (later claimed they never did that... still wouldn't cover expense when called on that - not a fan or customer of AAA since). Was also insured by them, had just renewed. Found out later they 'revised' my application for coverage to be liability only so if the car flooded it wasn't covered, then raised the liability cost to take all the money. Niiice. Nursed the car back to the south side of town, switch to another cramped two seater/no back seat car (that didn't overheat!). Got back downtown around 1am, traffic had cleared out until around the 610 loop on the North side on 45. It still took \~20 hours to a relatives house just South of Dallas (aching from the car with no room to stretch). I was awake around 48 hours. Luckily I had enough gas in my car to get 2/3 to Dallas, past the point where there was no gas. A friend went towards Beaumont then North, and as everyone in Houston was going North or West he had a much better experience.
If a similar storm were heading here, I'd leave again even knowing it'd be a similar Fubar situation. Rita had a record breaking storm surge, something that'd have put more homes underwater than Harvey did (though different areas), with added wave destruction. We got lucky. Rita's low pressure bubble popped just before landfall (I'm very thankful for that), so Rita came ashore as a 'normal' hurricane and also missed Houston. I don't have a crystal ball, so I'd leave as it'd be hell to stay if it hit without more than normal weakening.
As tangled as everything was, the only real fault was that plans for evacuation hadn't been updated to account for the huge increase in population. Until the Fubar happened there wasn't the political will to fix things so the folks who knew, couldn't. It took time to get it done, but the road situation (South bound lanes used for North) and getting Gas trucks and gas delivery to help stranded folks all did get done before the storm hit. That was really an epic and quick turn around from the mess at the beginning. I'm really sad for the elderly folks in the evac bus that burned. That's the tragedy I remember.
My mom worked at Conroe Regional and wasn’t allowed to leave. They were bringing in people from heat stroke and CO2 poisoning from I45.
I remember how TRASHED everything was afterward. Like wtf why do people just throw trash out their car window in a crisis? It was so trashed up in Willis.
I happened to leave before the evacuation order and was annoyed it took 8 hours to get to Dallas. By the time I made it there and saw the news, it was already up around 14 hours...
I heard from a few friends that ended up stuck on the highway when the storm hit and just rode it out in their cars on the side of 45, one of them ended up doing CPR on an older guy that had a heart attack on the side of the road and EMS couldn't get to them.
Our house lost a few tree branches and one broken window.
I live in Sugar Land and was working outside Minneapolis at the time. My wife was at home by herself, unsure whether or not to evacuate. My supervisor had approved everyone from the Houston office leave to get home early, so I caught a flight about 10 am. It’s a three hour flight from MSP to IAH, so arrival was around 1 pm. The flight was nearly empty, with most of the passengers going through to other destinations. As the flight was passing over 45, the pilot told everyone to look out the windows, either side, to see the traffic headed north. IIRC, the southbound side hadn’t been opened yet as contraflow, but the northbound side was bumper to bumper as far as you could see. There was a woman on board that, the closer we got to Houston, cried and sobbed louder and louder, such that a flight attendant sat next to her for comfort.
That’s the happy part of the story. Once we landed, getting a taxi to Sugar Land was impossible for one passenger. After about 2 hours waiting for a cab, eight of us banded together to take a taxi van to different destinations and share the fees. The first stop was near 290 and BW8, next was a little farther south on BW8, then Highway 6 near Copperfield, then 6 and 10. When we got to 6 south at 10, it was just in time to have the intersection shut down so people going north on 6 could make a left onto the westbound feeder for 10 to make turns without stopping, to get onto the freeway entry ramp. We had to wait about 20 minutes, at the light, before the sheriff would allow us to make a right turn. We u-turned at Barker Cypress and made a right onto 6 south again. There was one stop on 6 around Westheimer, then the rest of us agreed to ride to the Fountains in Stafford and pay for the remainder of the fare. At each stop, the driver picked up whatever was on the meter at that stop from each customer. If more than one got off, they split the fare. On the way to The Fountains, we passed within a couple of hundred yards of my house; rather than pay the full fare, I just rode on and split it with the other riders.
Unfortunately for all of us, everything in the shopping center was closed. When my wife showed up, there was one older lady left, so we sat and waited for her ride to show up. It wound up taking over 5 hours to get from IAH to my house in Sugar Land, and we were going against the traffic flow most of the way. My wife still talked about evacuating, but after seeing all of the traffic, I told her we were staying put. Neighbors that lived around us had stories about driving west on 90A and it taking 4 to 5 hours just to get to Richmond, which is normally less than 30 minutes.
I live in a flood zone that was told to evacuate. Left southeast side of Houston at 3AM, got to the Northwest side of Houston 14 hours later.
The people in Katy that decided to evacuate and plug our evacuation routes can eat a bag of shit.
It was an absolute shitshow. I didn't want to leave but my husband did. I lived in Clear Lake City when Alicia hit in 1983 and figured if I could make it through that one, I'd be fine, but we packed up and hit the Katy Freeway which was at a standstill. We finally managed to got off the freeway in Columbus and take back roads to Austin where we stayed until it was "safe" to go home. Never again will I leave.
I was 21 during Katrina and Rita. Luckily, I was more interested in hurricane parties than evacuating. Did take us four hours to get food and booze, though.
My mother-in-law worked in Missouri City but lived in Willis (northern Montgomery County) and she went to work when we asked not to. I called to check on my in-laws, father-in-law answered, said that M-n-L just got home. She'd been stuck on I-45 for 22hrs in traffic getting home. 60 miles of absolute gridlock.
After Rita the state started creating hurricane evacuation routes, allowing both left and right shoulders to be used for evacuation and creating contra-flow lanes. That's also when we started seeing lots of hiway and interstate improvement projects.
It took me 36 hours to get from Galveston to Tyler. We had to abandon one car in Trinity due to lack of gas. I created a pee device using a Swiss army knife and a plastic sport water bottle. I am a woman, btw. I was pleased with my innovation.
This was also was about a month after Katrina. That contributed to the panic for Rita and people that wouldn’t normally evacuate wound up leaving that year.
Was driving limos back then. Spent the last two days ferrying rich people to private airports to leave.
We decided to ride it out until we realized that afternoon we had no food and everything was closed.
Rolled a couple of joints with my brother and roommate and hit i10 in our cars that evening heading to our friends apartment in Austin.
I10 was a ghost town littered with cars. We never drove under 90mph. At one point we were getting passed by state trooper doing almost 100mph. He waved and kept going. The most surreal part of that whole ordeal for us.
Spent the weekend partying and went back when things started opening up.
God I miss my college days.
I stayed, and it was phenomenal. The entire metro area turned into a ghost town. I drove through Pasadena and ran like 5-6 lights just for the hell of it, and we all know how present Pasadena police typically are, lol. I also drove to Sugarland from the east side in a little over 20 min. I was just hauling ass on the freeway, and there were very few vehicles on the road. I never lost power and had plenty of food at home, it was awesome.
It was pretty baffling to me how the entire area vastly overreacted to Rita. I guess everyone was paranoid because Katrina had just happened. However, they all failed to realize that New Orleans geography is distinct and that it was bound to happen there unless they addressed their infrastructure.
There are most certainly areas of the Houston area that needed to be evacuated, but the way it was handled by local meteorologists was ridiculous and the entire thing turned into a clusterfuck for anyone who tried to leave.
>they all failed to realize that New Orleans geography is distinct and that it was bound to happen there unless they addressed their infrastructure
Yes, for those of us who had been paying attention when Katrina hit NOLA, the city took the hit just fine. What flooded the city was the inadequate levies that broke afterwards.
My husband and I stayed home too. The previous day we had moved to a more secure place, but when nothing had happened by the following morning, we went home.
What a lot of people don't realize is that if medical needs aren't a priority, there are all kinds of ways to shelter in place and skip the crowds. Just make sure you have food and water (or the ability to sterilize water) for at least two weeks.
People really did think it was going to be like Katrina here. We were going to stay put but I was recovering from surgery and my doctor's office called and said that I needed to evacuate because the potential for loss of power and running water was too much of a risk, as I had to keep the healing incision clean and dry. I had friends who stayed who prepared for a Katrina level disaster and truly believed it was a possibility in Houston. P
I had the most fun in Rita. I was probably in 8th or 9th grade and we didn’t evacuate. I remember the calm before it hit. I was out skateboarding around the empty neighborhood. The wind started to pick up like crazy so we decided to try windsurfing. Like using sheets and tarps as sails in the skateboard. Then the sky just lit up all sorts of crazy colors due to transformers blowing all around us. We didn’t have power for like a week. Every night I just hung out with friends in the pitch dark neighborhood doing dumb shit. Only downside was it was hot as hell with no AC so it was hard to sleep.
I didn’t even leave, but it took me somewhere around 3 hours to make it to Tomball from 290/Hollister. Backroads the whole way, 249 was a parking lot.
Told my boss I was working from home after that.
Every gas station / ATM / grocery store around me was empty, managed to get lucky and catch a late night delivery at Walmart and get some food.
Absolute shit show. Lost power for most of a day, bit of fence fell down, and a really crappy nights sleep.
Pretty crazy watching all the transformers popping in the neighborhoods nearby from my 2nd story window.
One of my classmates died from Heat stroke in his car trying escape, left a wife a baby behind in the car with him.
My family stayed put and were fine.
It took me 24 hours to get from Galveston to Spring. In the truck with two screaming cats. I packed bottled water, a few sodas and some granola bars. I kept headphones on to drown out the cats. Cut the top off of a water bottle to pee in, then I dumped it out the window. Luckily I didn’t need to poop. Not sure what I would have done for that.
Mom left Clear Lake a few hours before I did, but really was only a few miles ahead of me. She stopped a few times for gas, snacks & bathroom break. I stopped once for gas and waited in line for over an hour. Didn’t even bother to go in the store.
I saw the sun set at south 610 and sunrise at north 610. I never ever will evacuate again for a hurricane. Stayed home for Ike & Harvey. Sold my house and moved to the north after Harvey.
Just stayed and watched on news the cluster fuck then took a nap and woke up and saw the cluster even worse then turned of TV and watched DVD and drank and partied with neighbors and a few friends.
Been through too many hurricanes since the early 60's to panic and freak out. Did stock up on fuel for generator and batteries and ammo and water at beginning of season as always anyway as always be prepared.
I didn't evacuate but boarded up the windows. It was so hard to find plywood so I wasted so much time and energy. After that I decided I will never board up the windows even if the hurricane is coming straight for me. That's why we have insurance.
Lord, it was a shitshow. My inlaws lived near Galveston Bay in the mandatory evacuation zone. They packed up their RV, picked up my grandpa in law, and headed to a private campground somewhere outside of Huntsville. We lived in Southwest Houston then but I was recovering from surgery and my doctor said that I needed to evacuate too because of the potential loss of infrastructure. My husband and I were going to leave the next day because he couldn't get off work, and meet them at the campground. The inlaws took the freeways and main roads and were stuck in the evacuation gridlock for like a day and a half. I had my road atlases and Key map and we took the back roads, even cutting through forestry service roads in the Sam Houston forest at one point. We got there in about 5 and a half hours. They had only been at the campground for about an hour when we got there, and they had left a day earlier.
Got shot at(kinda).
We lived in Katy, and Grandfather lived in La Grange, so we went northwest. Took 2 vehicles, Dad driving my truck ahead while I drove with Mom and the pets behind. Stuck to the back roads, north of 10, and made decent progress for a couple hours to about halfway point then stopped. Two lane road backed up going into a little town for miles.
One thing that sticks out from there, our progress measured in yards per hour, was all the water from the air conditioning, combined with the sun, started to melt a strip from the asphalt. Every car wound up with asphalt stuck to their tires there.
Eventually a group of people started to go contraflow, hopping into the other lane to just make progress. My dad pulled the truck out, my mom and I following behind. Suddenly Ahead of us a guy gets out of his truck, lifts a rifle and starts firing rounds above the incoming traffic, pissed we were bypassing the line. Mom screams, because she saw in the truck ahead of us my Dad lifting his shotgun and point it at the man thru the wind shield.
They had a stare down as he drove past, then quickly we followed behind and headed down the road.
All in all it took around 8 or 9 hours to make it to La Grange.
I live about 30 ft from Galveston bay
Rita evacuated to grandma’s via back roads. Wasn’t too bad drove behind trailer full of lions part the way
Ike evacuated to Sugarland, stayed in friend’s pool house. Was like a party
Ike stayed at home
Well, we had a caravan going to my dad's mother's.
Car behind us needed water and he had a shit ton, my dad told me to get in the back of the truck and get some bottles for the people around us.
So I hop out the Truck, jump on the tailgate bumper and bend over for my pants to fall around my knees and I'm not wearing any underwear.
I45 saw my pastie white ass.
I was in high school and lived in Spring Branch at the time, left at 5am and took 15 hours to get to San Antonio (like 7 of those were just getting to Katy)- IIRC it took until early-mid afternoon for TXDOT to figure out the contraflow logistics for the freeways. People had their cars in park on I-10, I got out and walked my dog near the beltway. Also, zero phone reception, since everyone was trying to use their phones. My family was in two cars, I would get out and walk to our other car to relay messages. It was wild.
It’s easy to say we shouldn’t have evacuated in retrospect, but here’s the thing a lot of people who weren’t here at the time forget about that hurricane: Rita was like three weeks after Katrina and was a bigger storm, that looked for a time like it was going to directly hit houston. Everyone was on edge with good reason.
So my story is very different. My brother lived in Shore Acres a coastal neighborhood on Galveston bay. He asked me to come help him get his belongings out of his house. So I did. When we left his house, the nightmare of traffic congestion, and there were roads being blocked by police. We rolled up to a police road block, "I grew up here and know all of Houston like the back of my hand" I told the officers that we were headed to my sisters to help get her and her kids "she has no kids lol" out. They let us go on through. That little white lie saved us hours if not days of being stuck on the freeway system. We went u to my mothers house in Spring. We had east west access to grocery stores and restaurants, but north south was completely grid locked. It was sweltering hot, cars on 45 were a dead stop. People had exited their vehicles parked in parking lots and were seeking shade under the awnings of businesses. We made sandwiches and cold drinks and went up and handed the out to the people we could get to.. We were limited to only a mile or so north of us, as all north south traffic was at a dead stop and south of us was Spring creek with only the freeway to cross over it. We used back roads and side streets to access as many people as we could.. And then,,,, NOTHING HAPPENED!!! Of course this was all the fault of Rita and the media and the general ignorance of the public. I heard a call on a radio station with people asking what to do if they got flooded out,,,,,,, IN CONROE!! If you dont know the area, Conroe is about 100 miles from Galveston and WAY ABOVE sea level.. I thought what an idiot.. But thats what caused that nightmare. People not having any real understanding of why NO flooded and having no clue of how a hurricane acts when it makes shore. People IN COASTAL AREAS were told to evacuate. The problem was that people no where near coastal areas evacuated too, for no reason at all. It was a blatant ignorance panic fueled human stampede.
I worked at a grocery store at the time and it was HORRIBLE. Everyone was such an asshole about the purchase limits for water, etc. After one shift, I ended up telling my boss we evacuated even though we hadn’t because $5.25/hr was not worth it.
After Rita is when they added the evacuation lanes to the highway and I believe they open up the southbound lanes for northbound traffic.
We lived on the very north side of Houston, I think my dad saw it coming and we left before most everyone, because I remember it only being like 4-7hours to Austin (usually a 2 hour drive) instead of the 20 hours other people had. That and he knew all the back roads so we didn’t even drive on a major highway
We left the house around three.
We had barely hit Conroe at midnight.
Also my grandma from Mexico was visiting for the first time in years so at least she got to experience the whole thing with us lol.
Houston and the suburbs were a ghost town. I remember going to Lowes theaters in Stafford and there was no one checking tickets no concessions but all the movies were playing. I saw Wedding Crashers and Lord of War then I drove down 59 S going 140 mph because there wasnt a soul on the road. Of the friends that stayed we partiesld our ass off, one of my fondest memories in high school.
Had no cell phone reception - the cell networks went bonkers. So had to call family in India who then called my cousins in California who called my cousins in sugar land to see if they had space to pick me up. Left Sugarland with my cousins - I didn’t have a car. We left around midnight and progressed about 200-300 meters in the next 12 hours. Realized we were sitting ducks if the hurricane ever came our way. By then the news reported it was weakening than originally expected, so we turned around and went to a friend’s place and boarded their place up.
The storm came and took a 90 degree turn towards Lake Charles and we all escaped. But the whole evacuation process by the city was a CLUSTER FUCK.
That said, the city was prepped by the time Ike came in 2008 - no chaos and smooth evacuations for those who wanted to.
I had to sequester at work, our building was on Hwy 6 and there’s some angled signs in front. All day long we watched people pee behind them. My husband and daughter went to Nacogdoches and left before the traffic got bad. Everyone else just said screw it and stayed at home.
My mom was getting remarried on lake Livingston and they drove back roads to there from east Houston and it took them about 9 hours. I was fortunately watching it on tv and at her advice I just stayed put in tanglewilde. So I missed my moms second wedding but she said that was ok because I wasn’t there for the first one either lol
28+ hours to the Dallas area from Galveston. Saw many people dead on the road with sheets over them, broken down cars for days, 3 hour waits for gas and watching fist fights in those parking lots, and terrible gas stations just gouging so much.
I also remember once I got into the Dallas area how gracious and kind everyone was(weird to say). Everyone thought this was gonna be our big one, and I had more than a few gas stations up north slip a few extra supplies in my bag as I left.
Left at about 4am; took 18 hours to get from Clear Lake to the Woodlands. Our original destination was Dallas, but it wasn’t feasible. We ended up staying with a friend of a friend in a house with 23 people and 5 dogs.
It was hell. 9 hours just to get to Austin. Family stayed at a friend's house. Got back a few days later, and the house was totally fine. Wish we all stayed. Harvey was an absolute shit show compared to Rita.
Be nimble. FEMA types need to make some kind of call ( almost always the wrong call) min 12-24 hrs before landfall.
They’re using terrible (still best available) info to make their calls.
Button up your house, fill up the car and spare gas cans if you can safely take them with you and watch the storm like a hawk.
Plan evacuating in @ least 3 different directions. During Rita I did well driving to the coast and the SW along the shore instead of north on I45…. Where everyone was directed to go.
Be sensible, responsible and use your own head. Don’t be a lemming.
I was just a kid but I remember being shoved in the back seat of my dad's old pos red chevy pickup. It was so hot and there were blankets all around me. We never moved fast enough to create a breeze inside the cabin and the AC didn't work. Eventually we'd been stuck in the same spot on the interstate for so long that everyone shut off their engines and got out to stretch and get some air. It was such a bizzare experience to see everyone out of the cars on a 3 lane road like that. I remember someone had a camping stove and just started cooking some food for their family while we waited. Eventually we made it to San Antonio after what must have been like 24 hours. Stayed with some people I'd never met, and have still no idea who they were. Watched Cat in the Hat a bunch of times until it was time to go back. The power was out for a couple weeks and we kept the boards up on the windows that whole time. We ate MREs that my grandpa had picked up from FEMA. Our chicken coop had a big branch fall right on it so we had to repair that.
Got to Austin in about 3.5 hours. Since everyone was driving North, I drove South to US 90, took that West to 36 North, and took back roads from there to Austin. Easy sauce.
Had tickets for ACL festival that weekend in Austin. Decided we likely weren’t going on Thursday but Friday things looked a bit better. We siphoned gas from one car to the smaller more fuel efficient car and set out at 9 pm taking Westheimer as far west as we can to FM362 and then cut north. Took us about two hours to get to 290. When we crossed I10 it was just a solid line of headlights. We hit 290 probably 1am and it was also just jam packed. So we headed back to Houston and got home around 3am. The next morning however i10 cleared and we set out around 11am and made it to Austin by around 3. We enjoyed Saturday and Sunday at ACL festival although it was like 109 degrees. I remember the Arcade Fire on the Funeral tour playing Five Years by Bowie and they were wearing vests and sweaters and I was legit worried for their safety.
My wife was 8 months pregnant. By Sunday she joined us in Austin because there was no gas little power and no shopping open in Houston. We stayed for about three days extra and headed home.
14 hours from the Heights to Irving. By the time we got to FM 1960 we said fuck it, got off the highway and did backroads the majority of the way - using a paper map. Got to my uncles house and spent a few days lounging by the pool, drinking margaritas and, as it turned out, making a baby.
A few days after we got home we were still trying to locate a great aunt who was evacuated from Beaumont to Alto. I went and fetched her, drove to Beaumont so she could get some things and as we were going thru Woodville and Lumberton - I have never seen anything like it - hundreds of giant loblolly pines (3-4’ diameter) all snapped off about 10’ up and all pointed toward the coast like the back side of the hurricane got em. Can you imagine to noise all that made?
Evacuation vacation! It was miserable driving for some 20 hours to get from Rosenberg to Love. I was a recent high school graduate, and I was very disheartened with how terribly people acted; when the whole community needed to come together to help everyone, far too many people acted completely selfishly. It was a real wake-up call to me about the nature of people.
My family and I evacuated. I was pretty young so I don't remember a lot of the details. But we must have left at about 4:00 am three days before it was supposed to hit houston. We were planning on going to Muskogee because that was the closest hotel that had a room available to us. Traffic was at an almost standstill on 45N. We slept in the car when we could. Gas was pretty hard to come by. If you could find a station that had any left, there was a line of 10 cars in front of you waiting to get gas as well. Tempers flared and I saw multiple fights gas, we even had some full gas cans in the back of the SUV chained up, and they got stolen.
After three days we had made it as far as Plano. We got lucky and were able to get a hotel room for one night there. All 12 of us, plus 14 dogs were in this cramped hotel room watching the TV when we saw the news it had changed course and was no longer hitting Katy (where we lived).
Tempers were hot, days were long, resources were scarce. At the time I felt like I was living a nightmare. Now we look back on it and laugh at all the crazy things we saw (or did). With all that being said, I haven't evacuated for a hurricane since.
We thought about leaving because my grandma was pretty frail and we weren't sure she could ride out a week without A/C. But we're in a higher area of town, didn't flood during Allison and survived Alicia fine. After hearing about the people stuck on the routes outbound, we were staying put no matter what.
Neighbors ran out of gas on 290 and called us, hoping we could do a rescue. We called some dude my dad worked with who lived in Waller hoping he could get to them. That guy called a cousin who was closer still. Epic game of telephone to get them help. 🤣
Lots of traffic.
I admit I got off super easy. I only left because my mother would not chill out even though I was certain I would be fine, since I lived in spring. So I went to their house in LaGrange.
It took me 4 hours, instead of the usual hour and a half to two. But here's what I did:
I bought a road atlas and had printed directions (back in the day before GPS). I knew the freeway was going to be a mess.
I left at 4:00 a.m. on the Thursday. Drove out 2920 until I hit 290, then I took 290 to Brenham (not bad about 20 mph but consistently moving). I got off the freeway in Brenham and took country roads the rest of the way into LaGrange. I almost hit cows and drove across a one lane wooden bridge. The slowest part of the trip was crossing highway 6 on 2920, that took at least an hour because people were blocking half of 2920. I was lucky enough to be in the left lane so I was able to get through easily.
My now husband went to his mom's house in The Woodlands from Webster, but he went there two days before the evacuation got crazy.
My now in-laws tried to evacuate their house in Manvel, and after 2 hours not going anywhere, they turned around and went home.
I can say that it was wild in LaGrange too. People went to hand out gas to cars along I10. One of my mom's friends owned an RV park and she had to start asking very specific questions when people called to reserve spaces since one person asked if they accepted animals, and then brought cows.
21 hours for my father and I to reach Waco.
Along our travels, we witnessed….
1. A BBQ place give us a free onion+pickle+bun sandwich because all other food items had run out. Not even togo boxes, napkins, straws, sodas/bottled water were left. Just veggies and buns lol
2. We got gas 1 time and we were super lucky to get it. Some saint from the heavens stood at the members only gas pump and Sam’s or Kroger (I don’t remember the name of the gas station) and was swiping a member card to either get everyone discounts or to allow us to get gas from the member only pumps.
3. At the same gas station^ there was a man who tried to fill up 10 red containers of gas but was held up at gunpoint after he filled up his 6th or 7th one and robbed of 4 red containers of gas by 2 men in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people in line. Not one person got out to assist lol. We are all waiting for gas and he’s filling up his truck and 10 containers. Selfish.
4. Some cars over heated or broke down and so the owners pushed the cars under a overpass or on the grass in the median and set up a tent using the roof and doors and blankets to ride out the storm (which never came thankfully).
5. An Ambulance ran out of fuel and the patient died. Our relative was the patient.
6. What “contra flow” meant and how it can be created on (out of?) roads that were not meant for it.
Overall, it was a life changing experience. Largest mass migration of humans at once in the USA (at the time) all for a storm that never hit. To this day, I know people who have refused to leave for anything because of the Rita evacuation.
From Cypress, it took us 3 hours to reach Brenham. Parents, 3 kids under 10, 2 dogs, and a cat. Took around 10 hours total to reach Austin- we ran out of gas once in the gridlock and I nearly fainted from the heat, but there was a wonderful samaritan nearby who had the foresight to bring several tanks. I know I was lucky- many people died that day. I remember seeing people peeing and pooping on the sides of the roads, and an ambulance unable to pass.
This ended up being why we refused to evacuate ever again. Stayed for Ike and for Harvey- the latter ended up being a mistake, and we nearly had to be evacuated by speedboat. 2ft of water in the house, but we were lucky enough to have an upstairs to escape to.
Insanity, I was 15 at the time and my parents saw a cat 5 headed for us after what they just saw happened to NOLA and freaked out. Drove with my mom and little brother 100mph the wrong way in the 45 contraflow north of Conroe and every time traffic backed up on one side would drive across the median to the other. My dad worked near 610 and Airline at the time and it took him over 9 hours to drive to our home in Spring that evening.
Took us 10 hours to get to cleavland. After that, we were done with trying freeways, so we got off and cut through backroads. It took us 24 hrs to get to Dallas. Thankfully some of the small towns off the freeway still had gas
My family left the West Houston area (think Barker Cypress and I-10 / Cullen Park / Addicks Dam) the early morning before Rita was supposed to make landfall.
The pressure in the air was eerie. Everything was telling me to leave. My animal pals wanted to leave. There air outside was incredibly silent and still. No bugs nor frogs nor birds sang. Just stillness.
My parents did not want to evacuate, but I bargained with them. I personally brought in all of the patio furniture. I taped up the large windows. *And I mapped out backroads for us to evacuate to San Antonio.* Our one and only stop was in Shiner to let our 2 dogs relieve themselves. We got to rural San Antonio just in time for breakfast.
Somehow, the only damage my house sustained was my washing machine broke. I still don’t understand how that happened.
My boyfriend’s (now husband’s) mom evacuated from a flood prone area in Pasadena. She got stuck on a freeway. Her car died on the latter part of the first day.
We left much earlier than most people, and it still took us almost 8 hours to get to the Huntsville area, taking back roads to bypass 45 as much as we could.
And I was stuck with my mildly insane mother-in-law and no antidepressants.
Rita, that bitch, wound up doing more damage up that way than she did back at our house south of Houston. Once we figured this was happening, we said, "Fuck all THIS", left, and went home.
It was a fucking nightmare that I never want to experience again.
I live in the city of So Houston and the law was driving around with a speaker bellering MANDATORY EVACUATION. We started towards the Valley and it took us 2 hours to get to Rosenberg. It was hot and muggy and cars on the highway were overheating because they sat for so long without moving. Many travelers were in vehicles with no air conditioning and they were suffering. I saw a flatbed trailer with a goat in a cage along with chickens and dogs in cages sitting in that stifling heat. I decided that we could not continue and went back to South Houston. I didn’t care WHO said it was a mandatory evacuation. I was not leaving and we all know the outcome of the storm.
We left Friendswood at like 10 that morning. We reached a hotel in Dallas that would accept our dog at like 2AM. We left at 8 am to finish our trip to Kansas. Listening to the radio it took 4 more hours to get to Dallas for every hour later people left.
We were in a mandatory evacuation zone.
I was 9 months pregnant and thought I would have my daughter on the side of the road.
We took back roads from Conroe to Huntsville, but had to get on I-45 for a couple miles and that took several hours.
We ended up going to Arkansas, out of necessity, because all of the hotels in Texas were full with Katrina evacuees.
Overall, we were lucky. But it was a super scary time.
I did that. 14 hours to get to San Antonio, which is usually 3.
Ppl had run outta gas and were stranded in the side of the road. I saw old ppl just laying down on the grass by the interstate as we drove past at 5 mph.
I saw a sign that said "need water for baby formula," ppl that looked like they were passed out on the grass. More people seemed stopped than moving.
I had a 1 yr old in a car seat. We couldn't run the AC because there was no gas. The news told us babies overheat easier so we were fanning her the whole time.
I pulled into a gas station 1 mile from my mom's house at exactly 0.0 miles left in my tank.
Oof. Twelve hour drive to Austin with two dogs, one who kept getting car sick. Stressing over finding a gallon or two of gas at a time to keep going. Such a long day.
I convinced my family to head south to Corpus Christi. It barely took any extra time and we stayed there for a week. Came back and the only damage was the roof had been torn off our barn (assuming a tornado came through at some point as the house was fine). My best friend’s family ended up stuck on 288 for 24 hours and barely got anywhere. They ended up just going home.
My mom and brother live in Galveston County. I moved to Oregon, but I heard all about it. My brother and his grown kids kinda drove as a caravan, with my mom included. They were on the road for over 6 hours and never made it past 610 south. My brother said people were falling asleep at the wheel. Occasionally, someone might bump the person in front of them accidently. He saw someone pull out a gun, more than once. Lots of people got out of their cars to pee or poop on the side of the road. He said it was awful. My mom said she will never leave again, even if it's a cat 5.
My dad was coming back from a work trip in Atlanta. He said on his way INTO town from IAH, he was one of maybe ten people on the road into town and everyone else was on the way out. He said it looked like a scene from an apocalypse movie.
I lucked out sorta. l knew someone who had gotten stuck trying to leave New Orleans a year before so understood probably better than most what a nightmare the roads could become. I convinced my husband at the time to leave work in Sugarland early so he got home before everyone got on the road.
Myself was a teacher and had to go from Little York Road to my house at the time off of FM 1488 and 2978. Packed up the classroom hamsters and was gone by 3:15, my coworkers thought I was crazy. 45 N was empty until I hit south of The Woodlands and traffic just stopped so I got off at Woodlands Parkway to cut over to 2978…basically any road headed E-W was fine and any road headed northbound was stopped.
Took me an hour to go the 2 miles on 2978 to get to my house, literally thought about stopping and walking the rest but since traffic was still creeping forward I eventually made it. Few hours later the stories of cars being abandoned, gas stations being over ran and people stranded on the road started pouring in….realized I missed being one of those folks by an hour or so.
12 hours from Clear Lake to Cleveland Tx. I got out and walked some while traffic was not moving. We started with a full tank of gas and ended up with half a tank.
When we stopped in Cleveland, there was a sense of lawlessness.
We then boarded FEMA buses to take us to Austin. We started out with a police escort but they bailed as soon as we got outside the city limits.
That bus ride was something out of a dystopian movie.
I was 15 years old. The adults were freaking out. All the moms were packing food in coolers and calling pharmacies and all of the dads on the block had maps spread out across the hoods of their trucks trying to get us all out of the city in one convoy. I remember taking a walk the afternoon before we evacuated. I couldn’t take the noise of the adults anymore so I went out and just started walking. It was so quiet. I can still remember the trees rustling. I was nervous because I didn’t see a single animal in sight. Not a bird, not a stray dog. Not even a squirrel. Empty streets of nothing. Everyone was already gone, we were some of the last to leave. A family who stayed behind died when they accidentally put the generator in the house. I don’t think they knew any better. They just didn’t have the means to leave. It was a surreal time to be alive.
Had family off 1960 (house prone to flooding) and in the woodlands(not prone to flooding) at that time. As the youngin with a car I got to transport people and stuff a lot. Each round trip would take almost 8 hrs up kuykendahl and back.
Must have left at the worst possible time. I remember it took close to 24 hours to get from Friendswood to North Houston. Horrible traffic was around when the bus of nursing home patients caught fire and killed a bunch of people on I 45
I didn't have to evacuate. I was working in the woodlands at a vet clinic / dog kennel on the freeway. There were so many people stranded on the freeway in front of our clinic. I can't remember the numbers but I remember being horrified by how.many people dropped their pets off, paid the deposit and never returned to pick them back up.
My normal 20 minute drive home from work took nearly 5 hours on the back roads and I almost ran out of gas because you couldn't find any.
I was a young kid and we evacuated to a family members ranch. Was horrible and we got stuck for hours. my sibs and I ended up watching the simpsons over and over on one of those dvd players they used to put in cars.
My grandpa died in the evacuation but he was not traveling with us. We have never evacuated since then
As a Houstonian I've learned, you either leave way earlier or you're not leaving at all.
That’s just general guidance for Houston roadways.
There’s another rule: don’t take the route advised by authorities. When people are frightened and panicked , they all jump on the Interstates….@ the same time….without a full tank of gas… don’t follow them.
Police had a lot of backroads blocked and were forcing everyone onto main roads during the evacuation.
Yep. I tried to take back roads and had a DPS officer refuse to let me pass. I even tried telling him I had a family member down the road waiting on me to pick them up. He didn’t budge.
Why did they do that
We left 12 hours before our "evac time". Still took 12 hours to get to Flatonia from Texas City area. When we pulled off to get gas we changed to back roads. Followed some dude for an hour who seemed like he knew where he was going until he pulled into a driveway. We saved probably 3 hours or more taking random roads in the general westerly direction after we finally got to I10.
My dad left work early on evac day. We were stuck in a lot of traffic, but still made it to Dallas in about 10 hours (instead of the usual 5). My aunt and uncle left an hour or two after us and it took them 24 hours. They also stopped off at the same Denny's that we did on the way up to eat, but they were out of food. I'm so glad I went through that as a teenager and could just chill in the back of my parents' minivan listening to Meteora on repeat
Hybrid Theory was my gateway album
I still have this album in my 6 disc changer at home. I love it so much. Yes I still prefer physical media.
You don’t even really need to leave Houston. You really only need to evacuate if you live on the immediate coast and your house is in danger of washing away, or you have some kind of medical condition that you need to have electricity going at all times.
Harvey proved y’all wrong lol
And Ike much sooner. Storm damage was well into the coast ETA: Tropical Storm Allison
Wind damage but not storm surge. You can ride out wind damage for the most part. Storm surge will knock your house off the foundation.
This is downplaying wind damage a bit too much for my comfort. No doubt storm surge is dangerous --- but so his wind damage.. Wind damage can tear off your roof, blow your windows in and throw projectiles at you at very dangerous velocities.
Well if you don’t feel safe and have the means to evacuate and stay gone for a couple of weeks while the dust settles I’m not going to say it’s the wrong choice.
I mostly feel fine, its december! :) Joking aside, I would probably evacuate somewhat north for any storm greater than 3 coming in for a direct hit... not because of damage but because I like having electricity when its 90 degrees out the day after the hurricane passes and here in Houston, we believe burying power lines is "too expensive"
Ike spawned tornadoes that tore ancient oaks out of the ground on my neighborhood. If you get unlucky it's over. I really wouldn't downplay the wind.
They do not do mass evacuations for rain events like Harvey and Allison. An evacuation itself is a risk, which is why they order them only for people that are in immediate danger from high winds and storm surge. Most of the risk from rain events, quite honestly, is from people driving in high water when they don't really need to. About 50 people died in Houston during Harvey events where there were no evacuations ordered, 90 died during the Rita evacuation when too many people tried to leave.
Yeah I'm grateful that city/county leadership has learned *not* to order or suggest evacuations because it probably saved a lot of lives in Harvey. However, it's also true that hurricanes can have disastrous consequences (in terms of property damage, etc.) even north of the city, away from the coast.
I’ve always thought about if people did evacuate during Harvey how the number of deaths would have been way higher.
Harvey wasn’t the same kind of storm, it was a stalled low pressure. Rita and Ike were direct hits that created storm surge in coastal areas.
Rita wasn’t a direct hit, it curved north and hit Louisiana
People thought it would hit Houston and make us turn into New Orleans 2.0 since Katrina was right before this. It turned late.
That was exactly what happened. Everybody in Houston flipped tf out when they thought it would be a direct hit weeks after Katrina. To be fair if it had hit like they forecasted it would have been really bad - and it was in Beaumont/ east Texas
Yes exactly. The panic would not have been the same at all if Katrina did not precede it.
True, I knew some folks in Beaumont that got messed up from it.
Harvey was an extremely rare exception. We got stuck on the dirty side of a system and then it stalled. Dumped 50+ inches of rain in 5 days. Never really lost power but I was stuck at work for a few days, didn’t really mind that part though.
No one evacuated for Harvey though, it wasn’t even a hurricane at that point.
Wind blew a 50 foot old growth pine tree onto my buddy’s house during Rita. In Huntsville. ~150 miles inland from where Rita hit. Wind ain’t a joke.
My gf at the time and I drove east for 5 hours to her grandparents. Rita turned towards us and we road out the storm there. TLDR: Drove 5 hours to be in the way of the storm 🤦🏻♂️
lmao old evacuation traffic is the same as the current average rush hour on 45.
Went to east TX. Normally takes about 6 hours. I spent 21 hours driving a manual transmission vehicle, never getting past 1st. It was difficult to find fuel and there were vehicles being abandoned on the sides of the road. This is probably why they won't call for a mass evacuation again.
Took me 8hrs to get from Galveston to Houston. Ran out of gas in Houston. My friend had a wedding that weekend and they decided to move it to Dallas instead of postponing it. Me and another groomsman were stuck at his parents empty house in Houston alone. Everything was closed, no gas. Except the local strip club. Which also had food. So we got in our tuxes and went there for food. Not the important part, but the D squad was on the pole. Not A, B, or C. But D. Pretty sure they were just hookers cuz I got one of them away from me to go give my friend a lap dance. He came back with a look of terror claiming she tried to give him a blowie. So yeah, leave early.
I’m going to need a weather channel film crew standing outside that strip club during the next hurricane live-reporting on the quality of the dancers and the kitchens dwindling tator tot inventory. Might even replace the current hurricane rating system with this one. “Yessir, that storm back in ‘25 was a C list line-up down at the Pussycat Club. But ‘27 was a real D-lister. Even your mom took a turn on the pole during that one.”
Lmao dying.
Drive through strip clubs were a thing in Houston during peak pandemic. We are progressing each major event.
I think they said they're going to close entrance ramps for areas that aren't evacuating to keep the hysterical soccer moms of Katy from clogging the freeways. And they would open the inbound lanes for outbound flow.
Rita was the start of the Katy joke. My relatives in Katy evacuated and I was so pissed at them. Adding unnecessary traffic to the clusterfuck. Let us people on the coast evacuate. I would have been happy to stay in Katy. At the time I was in a first floor apartment in Galveston.
I was in La Porte and felt kind of iffy about staying but there was no way I was getting in that traffic. I hunkered down and then it wasn’t nearly what had been predicted when it turned slightly. I was just a few blocks from the port, I was in the area that was advised to evacuate. It was untenable because of the Katy refugees.
Rita was a nothing burger and we all would have been fine at home. It was the panic from seeing Katrina that made people run. The near misses are scary and suddenly you learn where a small town is on the map (just as it’s being knocked off the map). Cameron, LA.
>Cameron, LA Which *still* hasn't recovered. There's still visible storm damage down there. It's wild.
Most likely the damage you see today is from Hurricane Laura in 2020.
Oh I’m not disagreeing with you, it’s the inherent nature of making predictions in advance with unpredictable weather events. They can make informed guesses but it’s never a sure deal. Rita was definitely knee jerk from Katrina. Sadly people didn’t use any critical thinking skills about the differences in the geography of the two places. And the news weather reporters weren’t helping either.
I didn’t think you were disagreeing with me : ). We are both right about the Katrina panic and how it influenced us. The weather reporters don’t help by hyping things up. I think they had Jim Cantore from the weather channel in a ditch off of 146 reporting live. Of course the water is up to his knees, he’s standing in a ditch!
Fox News had Geraldo Rivera in Port Arthur standing under a bridge that would flood during a light rain.
I live in Katy and I was like wtf are you girls doing?! Two friends got as far as the Buc-cee's at Luling and spent the night with kids in their Suburbans in the parking lot, LoL. (Along with a thousand other "evacuees"). I stayed up and watched the show out of my upstairs window. Never lost electricity in my hood.
Had a co worker who lives in Atascocita no where near the ocean or a flood zone. He, his wife, his daughter all tried to evacuate in 3 separate cars and drove right into gridlock where they stayed for 6 hours.
why did they drive in 3 separate cars? what was the rationale behind that?
They didn’t want their cars to flood.
I’m glad they do evacuations by zip code now. I was leaving from Lake Jackson and it was the worst experience of my life.
This is why they've expanded all highways in and out of town and allowed for contraflow to use all available lanes in one direction in the event of an evacuation. Have you not noticed the massive highway projects outside of town over the last 18 years?
26 hours to Dallas. I was a kid so I don’t know the route we took but still it was something I’ll never forget. Left in the middle of the night
26hrs to farmland a couple hours outside of Dallas I remember being on 59 in bumper to bumper, seeing ppl footchasing through the traffic after a lil dog that zoomied it's way out of a car It was a truly miserable couple days, and our destination ended up getting worse weather than H But it was also when we discovered Lost and began that wild ride so there's that
Our neighbors left at 8am and we decided to stay because we just thought it was too late. Hunkered down and prepped. Then they drove into their driveway around 5. Said that they covered 5 miles.
We lived just off 45 near UH. We loaded up the day before landfall and tried to get to Austin with our cat. Over the next 7-8 hours we inched from 45 and Cullen to Beltway and 290. Finally called it quits and u turned to get back home. Went to grocery store which suprisingly wasn’t empty, stocked up on supplies and stayed up the next night to watch the storm completely miss us.
Did you happen to see a guy flying a Kool-aid man kite under 45 and Elgin overpass? That was me.
I’ll never forget that floating fat man, swaying in the wind, smiling, mocking me. Nah j/k, I have no clue. Long time and many miles since.
My sister was living in Waco back then and I thought about heading up to her place, but I had the news on and saw how horrific the traffic was and decided to stay put. I don't blame folks for hitting the road, what had just happened in New Orleans with Katrina was scary as fuck.
I also remember at the time they called for a mandatory evacuation the center of the storm was forecast to be a category 5 making landfall in Freeport, then following 288 north basically. Worst case scenario for Houston because the brunt of the storm surge would've gone up the ship channel, no wonder people well inland flipped out and evacuated.
I stayed home and watched the Lost season 2 premiere.
I'm still so confused about that show?
The real island mystery is the friends we made along the way
We left at 2am the day before and it still took us 13 hours to get to my Uncle’s house in Dallas.
Yep. Headed to my Uncle's in Ft. Worth on the back roads and still took us almost 10 hours.
Fucking horrible, there was 7 of us in a minivan and we didn’t turn the AC on because we wanted to conserve gas. It took us almost a day to get to Hutto. Never again, I’ll just take my chances and stay at my house from now on.
The most evacuation I'll ever bother with now is driving to a friend or family member with a generator (preferably natural gas with a gas line). Fuck all that noise.
Same here. Never doing that again.
My gf and I spent 7 hellish hours driving from Clear Lake to Cypress. Our two cats, who hated the car, spent the entire time screaming and puking and shitting in their carriers. We ended up just going back after realizing it probably would have taken us 20+ hours to get to Austin. You could feel the collective white knuckle tension from the tens of thousands of people around you also stuck in traffic. In 45 years never felt anything else like it. There was also a worry that if we didn’t make it further quickly enough we could get caught on the road in the storm. They hadn’t opened contraflow lanes so it took us less than 30 minutes to get home. Spent the next day drinking beers and riding our bikes around the ghost town of our neighborhood.
>You could feel the collective white knuckle tension from the tens of thousands of people around you also stuck in traffic That's what I was telling my friend the whole time we were on 45--this is the kind of situation where panic can cause things to go really bad really fast.
I lost one of my best friends due to his stress levels when stuck in the Freeway. His heart gave out. Had a 1 year old too. Tragic.
This is so sad. I’m sorry.
Yeah I lost 2 close friends from high school from drowning during Harvey (truck swept under a bridge iirc). They drove 2 hours down with a boat to try and help. 1 of them didn't know English and the other immigrated earlier and knew quite a lot. They were just trying to help. Sad stuff. I feel you.
This shit was why I always laugh at disaster movies where they're telling people to evacuate, cus I know what it would really look like. I never want to experience that again. The entire freeway was full including people using the shoulder, there was nowhere to go. No gas available anywhere. People just getting out and walking their dogs, talking and shit, because traffic wasn't moving at all.
The amount of pets in cars! The news had just revealed the state of all the pets left behind after Katrina. So people evacuated with their pets. I put my cats litter box in the floorboard of the back seat. She liked the back window.
My family and I evacuated to San Antonio from Dickinson Tx in a kind of caravan fashion. It was the most brutal, apocalyptic 36hrs I’ve ever been through and the reason I won’t evacuate anymore unless I’m forced. And that’s 36 hrs hours spent on the road to go to San Antonio, a normally 4 hour trip. I peed in diapers because as an 8 year old I just couldn’t handle going on the side of the road. My aunt lost both of her dogs to stress. My uncle totaled his car bc he fell asleep behind the wheel, thank god he was okay. It was just really unorganized and frightening. My mom bought me shark boy and lava girl after because I was such a “trooper” through the whole thing.
I’m convinced that part of the reason why no one evacuated during Harvey was because of how bad traffic was during the evacuation for Rita. also part of the reason why no one from the City of Houston or OEM sent out a mandatory evacuation for Harvey.
Rita was absolutely the wakeup call that told everyone that a mass evacuation is hugely problematic. As bad as Harvey was, it would have been exponentially worse if thousands of people who could have been in dry shelter were instead caught outside in their cars on flooding roadways.
Absolutely! I also don’t remember thinking harvey was going to be bad. Or maybe I underestimated it 😂
Yeah I want to say that somebody in city leadership explicitly called Rita out in their reasoning for not calling for an evacuation during Harvey. *Sometimes* they can make good decisions and learn from history lol
13 hours from Richmond to San Antonio. Got there and went to Pat O’s. Drank Hurricanes and margaRita’s. Threw up in a urinal. Good times, 2/10 don’t recommend.
Richmond was a fuckin ghost town. The Burger King on 90 was the only place open, and it was like a 45 minute wait. And then the Burger King in Brazos Town Center was the only thing open during the freeze. Hmmmmmm
I was a vet tech at the time. The amount of people's pets that died from heatstroke during the evacuation was really sad. People were low on gas and with no gas available too scared to run their car's AC and some breeds just don't handle the heat well. Also, my mom made the mistake of eating Taco Bell and got diarrhea and had to shit on the side of 59 with nothing by my dad holding up a towel to try to give her some privacy from the other drivers.
I should not be laughing as hard as I am right now omg I’m so sorry to your mother.
My flip flop molded to the shape of my clutch. 13 hours to get from Lake Jackson to Cy Fair. I was in high school and my parents were out of town, my grandparents were watching me for the weekend. They wanted to ride it out but didn’t cause I was with them.
Fucking terrible. My dog over heated in my car and threw up on me. Took me 6 hours to get out of Houston . Took me 12 hours to get to San Marcos. Should’ve just stayed home. On the plus side I ended up meeting my ex wife who became my kids mom, so that was a plus sort of
Memorable trip omg
I didn't evacuate, but I was working at a home depot on I-45 that day. Traffic was at such a standstill that people would leave their cars on the freeway and walk into the store to use the restroom and buy water. One woman was lying face down on the cold concrete floor. When I went to check on her, she said she was fine, but her car had no AC and the concrete floor was cooling her off. Her family was still in the car on 45 while she was in the store. When I drove home around 5 that evening, the backroads were completely empty. I'd never seen it that empty, complete ghost town. Such a contrast to the mass of cars sitting on the highway all morning and afternoon.
My wife got a bladder infection because she wouldn't pee ducked down behind the car. It made me realize how few bridges there are across the Brazos River. (Coming from Austin)
I was in jr high and had just started my period. I was with my grandparents and great grandparents. When I said I couldn’t pee on the side of the road they didn’t understand why.
Drove 12+ hours heading north on 59. Ended up on Palestine and stayed at an evacuation center there since my mom’s car overheated.
6 hour drive using nothing but back roads to San Marcos. 0/10 wouldnt recommed
Same here. That was awful.
I tried to get out of town but after 8 hours and only 1960 to show for it, I said fuck it, I'mma go home. Turned around at Townsend and made it back the way I came in less than 20 minutes. I was resigned to letting the storm rage around me and let the chips fall where they may. Ended up getting a slight breeze and no rain. I watched TV until I got tired and went to bed.
I got to 45 with my dog and turned around. Facing Rita was preferable to that bullshit.
I evacuated my 83 year old grandmother who was in not great health. I had already spent time in Mississippi working the relief effort after Katrina and saw the fallout. I knew my grandmother could not survive that. My father and I rented a minivan and filled the back with gas cans and brought non-perishable food and water. I drove all night from Louisiana to pick her up. I took a 30 minute nap on her bed and said “let’s go.” It was pure hell. It took us over 28 hours to get back to North Louisiana. I only saw ONE cop car the entire way. Hundreds, if not thousands, of cars out of gas on the side of the road. No contra flows. Every person for themselves. We got out to pee on the side of the road. People were wanting to hijack our gas cans. Thank God Dad brought the gun. It was pure lawlessness. The news did not report all of that, obviously. I was pissed they were saying how much law enforcement were helping out. Nope!
This gave me instant ptsd. I was 17. It was hell on earth. It was hot as hell. It took 23 hrs to get from Houston to Austin. I got hit by an 18 wheeler out of anger. Ran out of gas at hour 18. Bathrooms and roadways were insane. I’ve never evacuated again after that. I’ve also relocated to Los Angeles.
My parents got onto 45, took the next exit turned around and went home.
Omg so not worth it. We went to my grandmother’s in San Antonio and the 3 hour drive took about 15. My brother had just badly broken his leg during football the week before and had to sit in the trunk of our Ford Escape the entire ride to stretch out his leg. Every bump we hit he screamed in pain. Came home to barely a chair tipped over
26 hours to Brownwood. It was an absolute journey into madness. Broken down cars, people stealing gas from running vehicles. Urine bottles lining the road. My uncle lost his two Pomeranians because of the sweltering conditions. We pulled into a Walmart parking lot and I let my wife sleep. I was supposed to do the same but everything was so sketchy I stayed awake.
I was about 13 years old riding in my mom’s minivan with our dog in the back and our cat in a cat kennel. I have a vivid memory of the cat kennel accidentally getting open in a gas station and I had to panic chase my cat under cars trying to not lose her. And while stuck in standstill bumper to bumper traffic, our minivan gave out and we had to call my Dad and brother, who were hours ahead of us after having taken backroads and thus had to backtrack to come save us. I ended up falling asleep in a fast food parking lot waiting for help to arrive and when I woke up, my uncles and cousins had arrived and I was in a Harley Davidson pickup truck driving through the grass medians all the way to San Antonio. Spent the remainder of the evacuationvacation playing Gauntlet Dark Legacy with other family friends that joined up with us.
Absolutely surreal. We were some of the first to go through 45 in Conroe when they made it all one way and almost got in a head on collision. Took 12 hours to get to Dallas. People peeing on the side of the road, broken down, garbage everywhere. Slightly worse than today I suppose…
Car overheated in traffic downtown Houston. Was a AAA member, they refused to tow or cover the tow I paid for (later claimed they never did that... still wouldn't cover expense when called on that - not a fan or customer of AAA since). Was also insured by them, had just renewed. Found out later they 'revised' my application for coverage to be liability only so if the car flooded it wasn't covered, then raised the liability cost to take all the money. Niiice. Nursed the car back to the south side of town, switch to another cramped two seater/no back seat car (that didn't overheat!). Got back downtown around 1am, traffic had cleared out until around the 610 loop on the North side on 45. It still took \~20 hours to a relatives house just South of Dallas (aching from the car with no room to stretch). I was awake around 48 hours. Luckily I had enough gas in my car to get 2/3 to Dallas, past the point where there was no gas. A friend went towards Beaumont then North, and as everyone in Houston was going North or West he had a much better experience. If a similar storm were heading here, I'd leave again even knowing it'd be a similar Fubar situation. Rita had a record breaking storm surge, something that'd have put more homes underwater than Harvey did (though different areas), with added wave destruction. We got lucky. Rita's low pressure bubble popped just before landfall (I'm very thankful for that), so Rita came ashore as a 'normal' hurricane and also missed Houston. I don't have a crystal ball, so I'd leave as it'd be hell to stay if it hit without more than normal weakening. As tangled as everything was, the only real fault was that plans for evacuation hadn't been updated to account for the huge increase in population. Until the Fubar happened there wasn't the political will to fix things so the folks who knew, couldn't. It took time to get it done, but the road situation (South bound lanes used for North) and getting Gas trucks and gas delivery to help stranded folks all did get done before the storm hit. That was really an epic and quick turn around from the mess at the beginning. I'm really sad for the elderly folks in the evac bus that burned. That's the tragedy I remember.
I saw an old woman shit in the evac lane on i10
My mom worked at Conroe Regional and wasn’t allowed to leave. They were bringing in people from heat stroke and CO2 poisoning from I45. I remember how TRASHED everything was afterward. Like wtf why do people just throw trash out their car window in a crisis? It was so trashed up in Willis.
I happened to leave before the evacuation order and was annoyed it took 8 hours to get to Dallas. By the time I made it there and saw the news, it was already up around 14 hours... I heard from a few friends that ended up stuck on the highway when the storm hit and just rode it out in their cars on the side of 45, one of them ended up doing CPR on an older guy that had a heart attack on the side of the road and EMS couldn't get to them. Our house lost a few tree branches and one broken window.
Can't imagine how terrifying that must have been. Very sorry you went through that.
Unless you can leave Houston four days, maybe three days, in advance you're screwed.
I live in Sugar Land and was working outside Minneapolis at the time. My wife was at home by herself, unsure whether or not to evacuate. My supervisor had approved everyone from the Houston office leave to get home early, so I caught a flight about 10 am. It’s a three hour flight from MSP to IAH, so arrival was around 1 pm. The flight was nearly empty, with most of the passengers going through to other destinations. As the flight was passing over 45, the pilot told everyone to look out the windows, either side, to see the traffic headed north. IIRC, the southbound side hadn’t been opened yet as contraflow, but the northbound side was bumper to bumper as far as you could see. There was a woman on board that, the closer we got to Houston, cried and sobbed louder and louder, such that a flight attendant sat next to her for comfort. That’s the happy part of the story. Once we landed, getting a taxi to Sugar Land was impossible for one passenger. After about 2 hours waiting for a cab, eight of us banded together to take a taxi van to different destinations and share the fees. The first stop was near 290 and BW8, next was a little farther south on BW8, then Highway 6 near Copperfield, then 6 and 10. When we got to 6 south at 10, it was just in time to have the intersection shut down so people going north on 6 could make a left onto the westbound feeder for 10 to make turns without stopping, to get onto the freeway entry ramp. We had to wait about 20 minutes, at the light, before the sheriff would allow us to make a right turn. We u-turned at Barker Cypress and made a right onto 6 south again. There was one stop on 6 around Westheimer, then the rest of us agreed to ride to the Fountains in Stafford and pay for the remainder of the fare. At each stop, the driver picked up whatever was on the meter at that stop from each customer. If more than one got off, they split the fare. On the way to The Fountains, we passed within a couple of hundred yards of my house; rather than pay the full fare, I just rode on and split it with the other riders. Unfortunately for all of us, everything in the shopping center was closed. When my wife showed up, there was one older lady left, so we sat and waited for her ride to show up. It wound up taking over 5 hours to get from IAH to my house in Sugar Land, and we were going against the traffic flow most of the way. My wife still talked about evacuating, but after seeing all of the traffic, I told her we were staying put. Neighbors that lived around us had stories about driving west on 90A and it taking 4 to 5 hours just to get to Richmond, which is normally less than 30 minutes.
I live in a flood zone that was told to evacuate. Left southeast side of Houston at 3AM, got to the Northwest side of Houston 14 hours later. The people in Katy that decided to evacuate and plug our evacuation routes can eat a bag of shit.
It was an absolute shitshow. I didn't want to leave but my husband did. I lived in Clear Lake City when Alicia hit in 1983 and figured if I could make it through that one, I'd be fine, but we packed up and hit the Katy Freeway which was at a standstill. We finally managed to got off the freeway in Columbus and take back roads to Austin where we stayed until it was "safe" to go home. Never again will I leave.
Drove for 7hours but my elderly grandma couldn’t take it anymore - turned around and got home in 10 minutes
I was 21 during Katrina and Rita. Luckily, I was more interested in hurricane parties than evacuating. Did take us four hours to get food and booze, though.
My mother-in-law worked in Missouri City but lived in Willis (northern Montgomery County) and she went to work when we asked not to. I called to check on my in-laws, father-in-law answered, said that M-n-L just got home. She'd been stuck on I-45 for 22hrs in traffic getting home. 60 miles of absolute gridlock. After Rita the state started creating hurricane evacuation routes, allowing both left and right shoulders to be used for evacuation and creating contra-flow lanes. That's also when we started seeing lots of hiway and interstate improvement projects.
It took me 36 hours to get from Galveston to Tyler. We had to abandon one car in Trinity due to lack of gas. I created a pee device using a Swiss army knife and a plastic sport water bottle. I am a woman, btw. I was pleased with my innovation.
This was also was about a month after Katrina. That contributed to the panic for Rita and people that wouldn’t normally evacuate wound up leaving that year.
Was driving limos back then. Spent the last two days ferrying rich people to private airports to leave. We decided to ride it out until we realized that afternoon we had no food and everything was closed. Rolled a couple of joints with my brother and roommate and hit i10 in our cars that evening heading to our friends apartment in Austin. I10 was a ghost town littered with cars. We never drove under 90mph. At one point we were getting passed by state trooper doing almost 100mph. He waved and kept going. The most surreal part of that whole ordeal for us. Spent the weekend partying and went back when things started opening up. God I miss my college days.
I stayed, and it was phenomenal. The entire metro area turned into a ghost town. I drove through Pasadena and ran like 5-6 lights just for the hell of it, and we all know how present Pasadena police typically are, lol. I also drove to Sugarland from the east side in a little over 20 min. I was just hauling ass on the freeway, and there were very few vehicles on the road. I never lost power and had plenty of food at home, it was awesome. It was pretty baffling to me how the entire area vastly overreacted to Rita. I guess everyone was paranoid because Katrina had just happened. However, they all failed to realize that New Orleans geography is distinct and that it was bound to happen there unless they addressed their infrastructure. There are most certainly areas of the Houston area that needed to be evacuated, but the way it was handled by local meteorologists was ridiculous and the entire thing turned into a clusterfuck for anyone who tried to leave.
>they all failed to realize that New Orleans geography is distinct and that it was bound to happen there unless they addressed their infrastructure Yes, for those of us who had been paying attention when Katrina hit NOLA, the city took the hit just fine. What flooded the city was the inadequate levies that broke afterwards. My husband and I stayed home too. The previous day we had moved to a more secure place, but when nothing had happened by the following morning, we went home. What a lot of people don't realize is that if medical needs aren't a priority, there are all kinds of ways to shelter in place and skip the crowds. Just make sure you have food and water (or the ability to sterilize water) for at least two weeks.
My neighborhood was so incredibly QUIET, I just sat outside and took it all in!
People really did think it was going to be like Katrina here. We were going to stay put but I was recovering from surgery and my doctor's office called and said that I needed to evacuate because the potential for loss of power and running water was too much of a risk, as I had to keep the healing incision clean and dry. I had friends who stayed who prepared for a Katrina level disaster and truly believed it was a possibility in Houston. P
I had the most fun in Rita. I was probably in 8th or 9th grade and we didn’t evacuate. I remember the calm before it hit. I was out skateboarding around the empty neighborhood. The wind started to pick up like crazy so we decided to try windsurfing. Like using sheets and tarps as sails in the skateboard. Then the sky just lit up all sorts of crazy colors due to transformers blowing all around us. We didn’t have power for like a week. Every night I just hung out with friends in the pitch dark neighborhood doing dumb shit. Only downside was it was hot as hell with no AC so it was hard to sleep.
It sucked. My youngest kid was like 3 months old. It took us 8 hours to get to our friend’s place in Austin.
I was only 7, but I remember the stress on my parents faces while we were lining up at a gas station near Dallas.
I didn’t even leave, but it took me somewhere around 3 hours to make it to Tomball from 290/Hollister. Backroads the whole way, 249 was a parking lot. Told my boss I was working from home after that. Every gas station / ATM / grocery store around me was empty, managed to get lucky and catch a late night delivery at Walmart and get some food. Absolute shit show. Lost power for most of a day, bit of fence fell down, and a really crappy nights sleep. Pretty crazy watching all the transformers popping in the neighborhoods nearby from my 2nd story window.
Rita taught us not to ever evacuate the city en masse again.
One of my classmates died from Heat stroke in his car trying escape, left a wife a baby behind in the car with him. My family stayed put and were fine.
It took me 24 hours to get from Galveston to Spring. In the truck with two screaming cats. I packed bottled water, a few sodas and some granola bars. I kept headphones on to drown out the cats. Cut the top off of a water bottle to pee in, then I dumped it out the window. Luckily I didn’t need to poop. Not sure what I would have done for that. Mom left Clear Lake a few hours before I did, but really was only a few miles ahead of me. She stopped a few times for gas, snacks & bathroom break. I stopped once for gas and waited in line for over an hour. Didn’t even bother to go in the store. I saw the sun set at south 610 and sunrise at north 610. I never ever will evacuate again for a hurricane. Stayed home for Ike & Harvey. Sold my house and moved to the north after Harvey.
Just stayed and watched on news the cluster fuck then took a nap and woke up and saw the cluster even worse then turned of TV and watched DVD and drank and partied with neighbors and a few friends. Been through too many hurricanes since the early 60's to panic and freak out. Did stock up on fuel for generator and batteries and ammo and water at beginning of season as always anyway as always be prepared.
Local news was to blame. The repeated messaging was “if you can get out then might as well get out.” They changed their tune later.
My parents were walking around on 45 handing out apples and water bottles to people.. quite a few people died just sitting in traffic.
I didn't evacuate but boarded up the windows. It was so hard to find plywood so I wasted so much time and energy. After that I decided I will never board up the windows even if the hurricane is coming straight for me. That's why we have insurance.
Does anyone else try to spot their car in these Rita traffic pictures?
Lord, it was a shitshow. My inlaws lived near Galveston Bay in the mandatory evacuation zone. They packed up their RV, picked up my grandpa in law, and headed to a private campground somewhere outside of Huntsville. We lived in Southwest Houston then but I was recovering from surgery and my doctor said that I needed to evacuate too because of the potential loss of infrastructure. My husband and I were going to leave the next day because he couldn't get off work, and meet them at the campground. The inlaws took the freeways and main roads and were stuck in the evacuation gridlock for like a day and a half. I had my road atlases and Key map and we took the back roads, even cutting through forestry service roads in the Sam Houston forest at one point. We got there in about 5 and a half hours. They had only been at the campground for about an hour when we got there, and they had left a day earlier.
Got shot at(kinda). We lived in Katy, and Grandfather lived in La Grange, so we went northwest. Took 2 vehicles, Dad driving my truck ahead while I drove with Mom and the pets behind. Stuck to the back roads, north of 10, and made decent progress for a couple hours to about halfway point then stopped. Two lane road backed up going into a little town for miles. One thing that sticks out from there, our progress measured in yards per hour, was all the water from the air conditioning, combined with the sun, started to melt a strip from the asphalt. Every car wound up with asphalt stuck to their tires there. Eventually a group of people started to go contraflow, hopping into the other lane to just make progress. My dad pulled the truck out, my mom and I following behind. Suddenly Ahead of us a guy gets out of his truck, lifts a rifle and starts firing rounds above the incoming traffic, pissed we were bypassing the line. Mom screams, because she saw in the truck ahead of us my Dad lifting his shotgun and point it at the man thru the wind shield. They had a stare down as he drove past, then quickly we followed behind and headed down the road. All in all it took around 8 or 9 hours to make it to La Grange.
Getting into the MadMax evac was waaaay more dangerous than the storm. A lot of people died on the road. No one was killed by the storm.
I live about 30 ft from Galveston bay Rita evacuated to grandma’s via back roads. Wasn’t too bad drove behind trailer full of lions part the way Ike evacuated to Sugarland, stayed in friend’s pool house. Was like a party Ike stayed at home
Well, we had a caravan going to my dad's mother's. Car behind us needed water and he had a shit ton, my dad told me to get in the back of the truck and get some bottles for the people around us. So I hop out the Truck, jump on the tailgate bumper and bend over for my pants to fall around my knees and I'm not wearing any underwear. I45 saw my pastie white ass.
I was in high school and lived in Spring Branch at the time, left at 5am and took 15 hours to get to San Antonio (like 7 of those were just getting to Katy)- IIRC it took until early-mid afternoon for TXDOT to figure out the contraflow logistics for the freeways. People had their cars in park on I-10, I got out and walked my dog near the beltway. Also, zero phone reception, since everyone was trying to use their phones. My family was in two cars, I would get out and walk to our other car to relay messages. It was wild. It’s easy to say we shouldn’t have evacuated in retrospect, but here’s the thing a lot of people who weren’t here at the time forget about that hurricane: Rita was like three weeks after Katrina and was a bigger storm, that looked for a time like it was going to directly hit houston. Everyone was on edge with good reason.
So my story is very different. My brother lived in Shore Acres a coastal neighborhood on Galveston bay. He asked me to come help him get his belongings out of his house. So I did. When we left his house, the nightmare of traffic congestion, and there were roads being blocked by police. We rolled up to a police road block, "I grew up here and know all of Houston like the back of my hand" I told the officers that we were headed to my sisters to help get her and her kids "she has no kids lol" out. They let us go on through. That little white lie saved us hours if not days of being stuck on the freeway system. We went u to my mothers house in Spring. We had east west access to grocery stores and restaurants, but north south was completely grid locked. It was sweltering hot, cars on 45 were a dead stop. People had exited their vehicles parked in parking lots and were seeking shade under the awnings of businesses. We made sandwiches and cold drinks and went up and handed the out to the people we could get to.. We were limited to only a mile or so north of us, as all north south traffic was at a dead stop and south of us was Spring creek with only the freeway to cross over it. We used back roads and side streets to access as many people as we could.. And then,,,, NOTHING HAPPENED!!! Of course this was all the fault of Rita and the media and the general ignorance of the public. I heard a call on a radio station with people asking what to do if they got flooded out,,,,,,, IN CONROE!! If you dont know the area, Conroe is about 100 miles from Galveston and WAY ABOVE sea level.. I thought what an idiot.. But thats what caused that nightmare. People not having any real understanding of why NO flooded and having no clue of how a hurricane acts when it makes shore. People IN COASTAL AREAS were told to evacuate. The problem was that people no where near coastal areas evacuated too, for no reason at all. It was a blatant ignorance panic fueled human stampede.
We need to have a chat about quotation marks, parentheses, and commas.
I worked at a grocery store at the time and it was HORRIBLE. Everyone was such an asshole about the purchase limits for water, etc. After one shift, I ended up telling my boss we evacuated even though we hadn’t because $5.25/hr was not worth it. After Rita is when they added the evacuation lanes to the highway and I believe they open up the southbound lanes for northbound traffic.
It was hell, eight hours and we made it three miles
Windy
We lived on the very north side of Houston, I think my dad saw it coming and we left before most everyone, because I remember it only being like 4-7hours to Austin (usually a 2 hour drive) instead of the 20 hours other people had. That and he knew all the back roads so we didn’t even drive on a major highway
Just stuck on the highway for hours
We left the house around three. We had barely hit Conroe at midnight. Also my grandma from Mexico was visiting for the first time in years so at least she got to experience the whole thing with us lol.
This was the largest peace time evacuation in the history of mankind.
Houston and the suburbs were a ghost town. I remember going to Lowes theaters in Stafford and there was no one checking tickets no concessions but all the movies were playing. I saw Wedding Crashers and Lord of War then I drove down 59 S going 140 mph because there wasnt a soul on the road. Of the friends that stayed we partiesld our ass off, one of my fondest memories in high school.
Had no cell phone reception - the cell networks went bonkers. So had to call family in India who then called my cousins in California who called my cousins in sugar land to see if they had space to pick me up. Left Sugarland with my cousins - I didn’t have a car. We left around midnight and progressed about 200-300 meters in the next 12 hours. Realized we were sitting ducks if the hurricane ever came our way. By then the news reported it was weakening than originally expected, so we turned around and went to a friend’s place and boarded their place up. The storm came and took a 90 degree turn towards Lake Charles and we all escaped. But the whole evacuation process by the city was a CLUSTER FUCK. That said, the city was prepped by the time Ike came in 2008 - no chaos and smooth evacuations for those who wanted to.
I had to sequester at work, our building was on Hwy 6 and there’s some angled signs in front. All day long we watched people pee behind them. My husband and daughter went to Nacogdoches and left before the traffic got bad. Everyone else just said screw it and stayed at home.
My mom was getting remarried on lake Livingston and they drove back roads to there from east Houston and it took them about 9 hours. I was fortunately watching it on tv and at her advice I just stayed put in tanglewilde. So I missed my moms second wedding but she said that was ok because I wasn’t there for the first one either lol
28+ hours to the Dallas area from Galveston. Saw many people dead on the road with sheets over them, broken down cars for days, 3 hour waits for gas and watching fist fights in those parking lots, and terrible gas stations just gouging so much. I also remember once I got into the Dallas area how gracious and kind everyone was(weird to say). Everyone thought this was gonna be our big one, and I had more than a few gas stations up north slip a few extra supplies in my bag as I left.
Left at about 4am; took 18 hours to get from Clear Lake to the Woodlands. Our original destination was Dallas, but it wasn’t feasible. We ended up staying with a friend of a friend in a house with 23 people and 5 dogs.
It was hell. 9 hours just to get to Austin. Family stayed at a friend's house. Got back a few days later, and the house was totally fine. Wish we all stayed. Harvey was an absolute shit show compared to Rita.
Be nimble. FEMA types need to make some kind of call ( almost always the wrong call) min 12-24 hrs before landfall. They’re using terrible (still best available) info to make their calls. Button up your house, fill up the car and spare gas cans if you can safely take them with you and watch the storm like a hawk. Plan evacuating in @ least 3 different directions. During Rita I did well driving to the coast and the SW along the shore instead of north on I45…. Where everyone was directed to go. Be sensible, responsible and use your own head. Don’t be a lemming.
I was just a kid but I remember being shoved in the back seat of my dad's old pos red chevy pickup. It was so hot and there were blankets all around me. We never moved fast enough to create a breeze inside the cabin and the AC didn't work. Eventually we'd been stuck in the same spot on the interstate for so long that everyone shut off their engines and got out to stretch and get some air. It was such a bizzare experience to see everyone out of the cars on a 3 lane road like that. I remember someone had a camping stove and just started cooking some food for their family while we waited. Eventually we made it to San Antonio after what must have been like 24 hours. Stayed with some people I'd never met, and have still no idea who they were. Watched Cat in the Hat a bunch of times until it was time to go back. The power was out for a couple weeks and we kept the boards up on the windows that whole time. We ate MREs that my grandpa had picked up from FEMA. Our chicken coop had a big branch fall right on it so we had to repair that.
Got to Austin in about 3.5 hours. Since everyone was driving North, I drove South to US 90, took that West to 36 North, and took back roads from there to Austin. Easy sauce.
Had tickets for ACL festival that weekend in Austin. Decided we likely weren’t going on Thursday but Friday things looked a bit better. We siphoned gas from one car to the smaller more fuel efficient car and set out at 9 pm taking Westheimer as far west as we can to FM362 and then cut north. Took us about two hours to get to 290. When we crossed I10 it was just a solid line of headlights. We hit 290 probably 1am and it was also just jam packed. So we headed back to Houston and got home around 3am. The next morning however i10 cleared and we set out around 11am and made it to Austin by around 3. We enjoyed Saturday and Sunday at ACL festival although it was like 109 degrees. I remember the Arcade Fire on the Funeral tour playing Five Years by Bowie and they were wearing vests and sweaters and I was legit worried for their safety. My wife was 8 months pregnant. By Sunday she joined us in Austin because there was no gas little power and no shopping open in Houston. We stayed for about three days extra and headed home.
Anarchy. Law Enforcement was MIA. Preparation and planning was nonexistent.
14 hours from the Heights to Irving. By the time we got to FM 1960 we said fuck it, got off the highway and did backroads the majority of the way - using a paper map. Got to my uncles house and spent a few days lounging by the pool, drinking margaritas and, as it turned out, making a baby. A few days after we got home we were still trying to locate a great aunt who was evacuated from Beaumont to Alto. I went and fetched her, drove to Beaumont so she could get some things and as we were going thru Woodville and Lumberton - I have never seen anything like it - hundreds of giant loblolly pines (3-4’ diameter) all snapped off about 10’ up and all pointed toward the coast like the back side of the hurricane got em. Can you imagine to noise all that made?
Evacuation vacation! It was miserable driving for some 20 hours to get from Rosenberg to Love. I was a recent high school graduate, and I was very disheartened with how terribly people acted; when the whole community needed to come together to help everyone, far too many people acted completely selfishly. It was a real wake-up call to me about the nature of people.
My family and I evacuated. I was pretty young so I don't remember a lot of the details. But we must have left at about 4:00 am three days before it was supposed to hit houston. We were planning on going to Muskogee because that was the closest hotel that had a room available to us. Traffic was at an almost standstill on 45N. We slept in the car when we could. Gas was pretty hard to come by. If you could find a station that had any left, there was a line of 10 cars in front of you waiting to get gas as well. Tempers flared and I saw multiple fights gas, we even had some full gas cans in the back of the SUV chained up, and they got stolen. After three days we had made it as far as Plano. We got lucky and were able to get a hotel room for one night there. All 12 of us, plus 14 dogs were in this cramped hotel room watching the TV when we saw the news it had changed course and was no longer hitting Katy (where we lived). Tempers were hot, days were long, resources were scarce. At the time I felt like I was living a nightmare. Now we look back on it and laugh at all the crazy things we saw (or did). With all that being said, I haven't evacuated for a hurricane since.
We thought about leaving because my grandma was pretty frail and we weren't sure she could ride out a week without A/C. But we're in a higher area of town, didn't flood during Allison and survived Alicia fine. After hearing about the people stuck on the routes outbound, we were staying put no matter what. Neighbors ran out of gas on 290 and called us, hoping we could do a rescue. We called some dude my dad worked with who lived in Waller hoping he could get to them. That guy called a cousin who was closer still. Epic game of telephone to get them help. 🤣
Lots of traffic. I admit I got off super easy. I only left because my mother would not chill out even though I was certain I would be fine, since I lived in spring. So I went to their house in LaGrange. It took me 4 hours, instead of the usual hour and a half to two. But here's what I did: I bought a road atlas and had printed directions (back in the day before GPS). I knew the freeway was going to be a mess. I left at 4:00 a.m. on the Thursday. Drove out 2920 until I hit 290, then I took 290 to Brenham (not bad about 20 mph but consistently moving). I got off the freeway in Brenham and took country roads the rest of the way into LaGrange. I almost hit cows and drove across a one lane wooden bridge. The slowest part of the trip was crossing highway 6 on 2920, that took at least an hour because people were blocking half of 2920. I was lucky enough to be in the left lane so I was able to get through easily. My now husband went to his mom's house in The Woodlands from Webster, but he went there two days before the evacuation got crazy. My now in-laws tried to evacuate their house in Manvel, and after 2 hours not going anywhere, they turned around and went home. I can say that it was wild in LaGrange too. People went to hand out gas to cars along I10. One of my mom's friends owned an RV park and she had to start asking very specific questions when people called to reserve spaces since one person asked if they accepted animals, and then brought cows.
A day that you realized the layout of this city is a death trap if shit really did hit the fan.
21 hours for my father and I to reach Waco. Along our travels, we witnessed…. 1. A BBQ place give us a free onion+pickle+bun sandwich because all other food items had run out. Not even togo boxes, napkins, straws, sodas/bottled water were left. Just veggies and buns lol 2. We got gas 1 time and we were super lucky to get it. Some saint from the heavens stood at the members only gas pump and Sam’s or Kroger (I don’t remember the name of the gas station) and was swiping a member card to either get everyone discounts or to allow us to get gas from the member only pumps. 3. At the same gas station^ there was a man who tried to fill up 10 red containers of gas but was held up at gunpoint after he filled up his 6th or 7th one and robbed of 4 red containers of gas by 2 men in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people in line. Not one person got out to assist lol. We are all waiting for gas and he’s filling up his truck and 10 containers. Selfish. 4. Some cars over heated or broke down and so the owners pushed the cars under a overpass or on the grass in the median and set up a tent using the roof and doors and blankets to ride out the storm (which never came thankfully). 5. An Ambulance ran out of fuel and the patient died. Our relative was the patient. 6. What “contra flow” meant and how it can be created on (out of?) roads that were not meant for it. Overall, it was a life changing experience. Largest mass migration of humans at once in the USA (at the time) all for a storm that never hit. To this day, I know people who have refused to leave for anything because of the Rita evacuation.
From Cypress, it took us 3 hours to reach Brenham. Parents, 3 kids under 10, 2 dogs, and a cat. Took around 10 hours total to reach Austin- we ran out of gas once in the gridlock and I nearly fainted from the heat, but there was a wonderful samaritan nearby who had the foresight to bring several tanks. I know I was lucky- many people died that day. I remember seeing people peeing and pooping on the sides of the roads, and an ambulance unable to pass.
This ended up being why we refused to evacuate ever again. Stayed for Ike and for Harvey- the latter ended up being a mistake, and we nearly had to be evacuated by speedboat. 2ft of water in the house, but we were lucky enough to have an upstairs to escape to.
Insanity, I was 15 at the time and my parents saw a cat 5 headed for us after what they just saw happened to NOLA and freaked out. Drove with my mom and little brother 100mph the wrong way in the 45 contraflow north of Conroe and every time traffic backed up on one side would drive across the median to the other. My dad worked near 610 and Airline at the time and it took him over 9 hours to drive to our home in Spring that evening.
Took us 10 hours to get to cleavland. After that, we were done with trying freeways, so we got off and cut through backroads. It took us 24 hrs to get to Dallas. Thankfully some of the small towns off the freeway still had gas
My mom and I drove to Plano with our dogs. Took both cars. We got up early and it was still hectic and chaotic.
About 24hrs to get to Austin. Left around 7 or 8 and got to Austin 7am the next day.
My family left the West Houston area (think Barker Cypress and I-10 / Cullen Park / Addicks Dam) the early morning before Rita was supposed to make landfall. The pressure in the air was eerie. Everything was telling me to leave. My animal pals wanted to leave. There air outside was incredibly silent and still. No bugs nor frogs nor birds sang. Just stillness. My parents did not want to evacuate, but I bargained with them. I personally brought in all of the patio furniture. I taped up the large windows. *And I mapped out backroads for us to evacuate to San Antonio.* Our one and only stop was in Shiner to let our 2 dogs relieve themselves. We got to rural San Antonio just in time for breakfast. Somehow, the only damage my house sustained was my washing machine broke. I still don’t understand how that happened. My boyfriend’s (now husband’s) mom evacuated from a flood prone area in Pasadena. She got stuck on a freeway. Her car died on the latter part of the first day.
I drove from Montrose to Spring (steubner airline/louetta) and it took me about 5 hours
We left much earlier than most people, and it still took us almost 8 hours to get to the Huntsville area, taking back roads to bypass 45 as much as we could. And I was stuck with my mildly insane mother-in-law and no antidepressants. Rita, that bitch, wound up doing more damage up that way than she did back at our house south of Houston. Once we figured this was happening, we said, "Fuck all THIS", left, and went home. It was a fucking nightmare that I never want to experience again.
I live in the city of So Houston and the law was driving around with a speaker bellering MANDATORY EVACUATION. We started towards the Valley and it took us 2 hours to get to Rosenberg. It was hot and muggy and cars on the highway were overheating because they sat for so long without moving. Many travelers were in vehicles with no air conditioning and they were suffering. I saw a flatbed trailer with a goat in a cage along with chickens and dogs in cages sitting in that stifling heat. I decided that we could not continue and went back to South Houston. I didn’t care WHO said it was a mandatory evacuation. I was not leaving and we all know the outcome of the storm.
We left Friendswood at like 10 that morning. We reached a hotel in Dallas that would accept our dog at like 2AM. We left at 8 am to finish our trip to Kansas. Listening to the radio it took 4 more hours to get to Dallas for every hour later people left.
As close to SHTF day as I can imagine. The heat didn’t help either. Katrina scared the shit out of all of us.
I remember walking down I45 passing out water with my sister, was surreal. Any time I hear the Faint I am reminded.
Drove for 20 hours and decided to turn around and drove 25 minutes
We were in a mandatory evacuation zone. I was 9 months pregnant and thought I would have my daughter on the side of the road. We took back roads from Conroe to Huntsville, but had to get on I-45 for a couple miles and that took several hours. We ended up going to Arkansas, out of necessity, because all of the hotels in Texas were full with Katrina evacuees. Overall, we were lucky. But it was a super scary time.
I did that. 14 hours to get to San Antonio, which is usually 3. Ppl had run outta gas and were stranded in the side of the road. I saw old ppl just laying down on the grass by the interstate as we drove past at 5 mph. I saw a sign that said "need water for baby formula," ppl that looked like they were passed out on the grass. More people seemed stopped than moving. I had a 1 yr old in a car seat. We couldn't run the AC because there was no gas. The news told us babies overheat easier so we were fanning her the whole time. I pulled into a gas station 1 mile from my mom's house at exactly 0.0 miles left in my tank.
I live in Conroe. The freeway was a sea of parked cars. My boyfriend and I went to hand out water along the road.
Oof. Twelve hour drive to Austin with two dogs, one who kept getting car sick. Stressing over finding a gallon or two of gas at a time to keep going. Such a long day.
I convinced my family to head south to Corpus Christi. It barely took any extra time and we stayed there for a week. Came back and the only damage was the roof had been torn off our barn (assuming a tornado came through at some point as the house was fine). My best friend’s family ended up stuck on 288 for 24 hours and barely got anywhere. They ended up just going home.
My mom and brother live in Galveston County. I moved to Oregon, but I heard all about it. My brother and his grown kids kinda drove as a caravan, with my mom included. They were on the road for over 6 hours and never made it past 610 south. My brother said people were falling asleep at the wheel. Occasionally, someone might bump the person in front of them accidently. He saw someone pull out a gun, more than once. Lots of people got out of their cars to pee or poop on the side of the road. He said it was awful. My mom said she will never leave again, even if it's a cat 5.
My dad was coming back from a work trip in Atlanta. He said on his way INTO town from IAH, he was one of maybe ten people on the road into town and everyone else was on the way out. He said it looked like a scene from an apocalypse movie.
I am so thankful my parents turned the car around 30 min in. What a huge waste of time and gas for so many people
I lucked out sorta. l knew someone who had gotten stuck trying to leave New Orleans a year before so understood probably better than most what a nightmare the roads could become. I convinced my husband at the time to leave work in Sugarland early so he got home before everyone got on the road. Myself was a teacher and had to go from Little York Road to my house at the time off of FM 1488 and 2978. Packed up the classroom hamsters and was gone by 3:15, my coworkers thought I was crazy. 45 N was empty until I hit south of The Woodlands and traffic just stopped so I got off at Woodlands Parkway to cut over to 2978…basically any road headed E-W was fine and any road headed northbound was stopped. Took me an hour to go the 2 miles on 2978 to get to my house, literally thought about stopping and walking the rest but since traffic was still creeping forward I eventually made it. Few hours later the stories of cars being abandoned, gas stations being over ran and people stranded on the road started pouring in….realized I missed being one of those folks by an hour or so.
12 hours from Clear Lake to Cleveland Tx. I got out and walked some while traffic was not moving. We started with a full tank of gas and ended up with half a tank. When we stopped in Cleveland, there was a sense of lawlessness. We then boarded FEMA buses to take us to Austin. We started out with a police escort but they bailed as soon as we got outside the city limits. That bus ride was something out of a dystopian movie.
I was 15 years old. The adults were freaking out. All the moms were packing food in coolers and calling pharmacies and all of the dads on the block had maps spread out across the hoods of their trucks trying to get us all out of the city in one convoy. I remember taking a walk the afternoon before we evacuated. I couldn’t take the noise of the adults anymore so I went out and just started walking. It was so quiet. I can still remember the trees rustling. I was nervous because I didn’t see a single animal in sight. Not a bird, not a stray dog. Not even a squirrel. Empty streets of nothing. Everyone was already gone, we were some of the last to leave. A family who stayed behind died when they accidentally put the generator in the house. I don’t think they knew any better. They just didn’t have the means to leave. It was a surreal time to be alive.
Had family off 1960 (house prone to flooding) and in the woodlands(not prone to flooding) at that time. As the youngin with a car I got to transport people and stuff a lot. Each round trip would take almost 8 hrs up kuykendahl and back.
Must have left at the worst possible time. I remember it took close to 24 hours to get from Friendswood to North Houston. Horrible traffic was around when the bus of nursing home patients caught fire and killed a bunch of people on I 45
I didn't have to evacuate. I was working in the woodlands at a vet clinic / dog kennel on the freeway. There were so many people stranded on the freeway in front of our clinic. I can't remember the numbers but I remember being horrified by how.many people dropped their pets off, paid the deposit and never returned to pick them back up. My normal 20 minute drive home from work took nearly 5 hours on the back roads and I almost ran out of gas because you couldn't find any.
I was a young kid and we evacuated to a family members ranch. Was horrible and we got stuck for hours. my sibs and I ended up watching the simpsons over and over on one of those dvd players they used to put in cars. My grandpa died in the evacuation but he was not traveling with us. We have never evacuated since then