Houston – With days of warnings about Hurricane Rita ringing in their ears, as many as 2.5 million people jammed evacuation routes Thursday, creating colossal 100-mile-long traffic jams that left many people stranded and out of gas as the huge storm bore down on the Texas coast.
Acknowledging that “being on the highway is a deathtrap,” Houston Mayor Bill White asked for military help in rushing fuel to stranded drivers.
White and the top official in Harris County, Judge Robert Eckels, admitted that their plans had not anticipated the volume of traffic. They insisted that they had not urged such a widespread evacuation, although only a day earlier they invoked the specter of Hurricane Katrina and told residents that the “time for waiting was over.”
Officials also made matters worse for themselves by announcing at one point that they would use inbound lanes on one highway to ease the outbound crush, only to drop the plan later, saying it was impractical.
But Thursday night, with nobody moving, the recommendation changed, and Houston officials said that the time had passed for residents to leave the city in advance of Hurricane Rita. Except for those living in low-lying areas, which were under mandatory evacuation orders, everyone still in the city should find as safe a place as possible and stay in the city to ride out the storm, they said.
Rita shifted course slightly Thursday toward the north, with landfall expected between Galveston, Texas, and Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana line, early Saturday.
Thursday evening, Rita was centered about 350 miles east- southeast of Galveston and was moving at near 10 mph. The hurricane was downgraded from a Category 5 storm to a Category 4 as its winds decreased to 145 mph from 175 mph.
Forecasters warned of the possibility of a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet, battering waves and rain of up to 15 inches along the Texas and western Louisiana coast.
The unending lines of vehicles heading out of Houston were only one indication of how seriously people along the Gulf Coast regarded the threat of Hurricane Rita, particularly after the devastation and death caused less than a month ago by Hurricane Katrina when it slammed into the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts.
In Baton Rouge, La., Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco called for the evacuation of nearly half a million people in the southwestern portion of her state.
“Head north, head north,” she said. “You cannot go east, you cannot go west, head north. If you know the local roads that go north, take those.”
Noting the difficulty that medical examiners have had in identifying the dead from Hurricane Katrina, Blanco offered morbid advice to those who refuse to evacuate: “Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms in indelible ink.”
Rita’s course shift Thursday offered a glimmer of hope to the panicked Houston area but threatened further flooding in New Orleans and other areas devastated by Katrina.
Officials warned that the storm still had the potential to cause widespread damage to Houston, and after witnessing what happened in New Orleans, few people in Houston were willing to take their chances.
Houston’s two major airports, Hobby Airport and Bush Intercontinental, suffered major delays when more than 150 screeners from the Transportation Security Administration, facing their own evacuation concerns, did not show up for work.
The agency later rushed in replacements, a spokeswoman said, but passengers, already burdening the system with extra luggage for their trips to safety, waited for hours to go through security.
Some drivers, after crawling only 10 or 20 miles in nine hours, turned around to take their chances at home rather than risk being caught in the open when Rita strikes.
Starting Wednesday night and throughout Thursday, the major evacuation routes – to Dallas, San Antonio, College Station, Austin and Lufkin – grew into 100-mile-long parking lots.
Drivers heeding the call to evacuate Galveston Island and other low-lying areas took four and five hours to cover the 50 miles to Houston. And there, the long crawl north began in earnest.
The delays were long enough for one ice cream seller on Interstate 45 to do a brisk business on the highway, as motorists left their stopped cars to purchase refreshments. Cars overheated and broke down, and others ran out of gas, worsening the crush.
While Rita is expected to hit the shore with as much strength as Katrina did, forecasters added another concern Thursday, saying it was likely to stall inland for several days and disgorge enormous amounts of rain.
Hurricane Katrina, while similar in intensity and size, did not cause inland flooding after hitting the Gulf Coast because it was swept out of the South by the jet stream, said Timothy Schott, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
But the jet stream, a high-altitude, east-flowing river of air, has shifted to near the Great Lakes, Schott said, and so cannot be relied on to “scoop out” the swirling, Georgia-size mass of moisture and rain clouds that will be left behind as Hurricane Rita moves over East Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
“This is looming as a big problem,” he said. “The storm could spend three days hanging around there” and could easily produce 10 inches or more of rain, enough to cause intense flooding.
