Houston – With Rita closing in, the family of Albert Ruben Sr. drove here this morning to a high school basketball auditorium turned hurricane shelter of last resort – after taking the most maddening journey of their lives.
In a caravan of 20 cars, the Ruben family and their neighbors in the coastal town of Texas City had tried to obey the state’s mandatory hurricane evacuation order.
With full gas tanks, food and water, they left on a designated evacuation highway at 11:30 Wednesday night, hoping to beat the rush and avoid the heat.
Seventeen hours later, they had traveled just 60 miles.
They had driven most of that time – in daytime temperatures of about 100 degrees – without air conditioning to save fuel. All public services along the evacuation route – gas, food, water, bathrooms – were closed.
“It was like the end of the world,” said Ruben, 50. “You know what it makes you want to do? It makes you want to go home and die. The government done us wrong.”
Ruben and most of his family gave up and drove back home to Texas City for the night.
Other family members, including his wife’s mother, decided to solider on in traffic and head north. Ruben said he hasn’t heard from them and doesn’t know where they are.
Friday morning, of course, Rita was still coming and the Ruben family had to do something.
Ten members of the family got back in their cars and went to Milby High School in southeastern Houston. Ruben’s daughter had been on the phone to police and had been told the high school would be a shelter.
They arrived about 8 a.m. Friday at the high school. Police told them it was full and suggested they drive to a nearby high school basketball auditorium called Barnett Field House.
When the Ruben family found the field house, it was just opening as a shelter. It offered bathrooms and water but no food, diapers or medicine.
Houston Mayor Bill White has made it clear in repeated interviews that he did not want city residents to look to city shelters as a primary option for riding out the hurricane.
The mayor even declined to name a shelter where people might go, saying that police and emergency people will open shelters “without announcements to the general public.”
But the general public quickly found Barnett Field House. Indeed, they found it in such numbers that it was packed with evacuees by midday.
Just how safe the auditorium would be was unclear. Police told a reporter that the floor of the auditorium had flooded during Hurricane Alicia in 1983. That information was not announced, though, to the several thousand people who had come to the building to escape Rita.
