“Don’t follow the example of New Orleans and think someone’s going to get you.”īut Thursday as the traffic chaos worsened, he and Eckels appeared to back off their dire warnings, saying that the only mandatory evacuation order concerned those in flood-prone areas along the coast. “Don’t wait the time for waiting is over,” White urged Wednesday. Many stranded motorists said they had responded to official pleas to flee made by White and Eckels, who often invoked the specter of Hurricane Katrina. At one point, Adcock said, he called the Texas Department of Transportation for an alternate route but the woman who answered the phone could not find a map.
“We did everything we were supposed to do,” he said, “secure our house, left early, checked routes, checked on our neighbors.” But he said, “when we got out there, we were totally on our own.”Īn HOV lane went unused, he said, and they saw no police officers. Timothy Adcock, 48, a Houston landscaper who said he had worked on the former President Bush’s home and was in the 15th hour of inching to Tyler in a companion’s pickup after his car broke down under the grueling conditions, said, “I never saw anything so disorganized.” The situation raised serious worries about how the city would handle something like a terrorist attack, he said. “Dying not from the storm but from the evacuation.” “The question is how many people will be gravely ill and die sitting on the side of the freeway,” State Rep. And there the long crawl north began in earnest.
GRIDLOCK JEEP DRIVERS
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. Starting Wednesday night and throughout Thursday, the major evacuation routes – Interstate 45 north to Dallas, I-10 West to San Antonio and Route 290 to College Station and Austin and 59 to Lufkin – grew into 100-mile-long parking lots. The unending lines of vehicles heading out of Houston was 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.Īfter crawling only 10 or 20 miles in nine hours, some drivers turned around to take their chances at home rather than risk being caught in the open when the hurricane strikes. 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 abort the plan later, saying it was impractical. They maintained 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.” White and the top official in Harris County, Judge Robert Eckels, admitted that their plans had not anticipated the volume of traffic. HOUSTON – Heeding days of dire warnings about Hurricane Rita, more than 2 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.Īcknowledging that “being on the highway is a deathtrap,” Mayor Bill White asked for military help in rushing fuel to stranded drivers.
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