ESCAPING THE ESCAPE
Posted: Friday, September 23 at 12:44 am CT by Bob Sullivan
HOUSTON – It looks a bit like a poorly maintained roadside picnic area, or a lightly-attended football tailgate party. There are even people sitting with their dogs on pickup tailgates, drinking beer.
But the drivers who lined up Thursday afternoon, just off an exit on Texas Route 59, haven’t parked there looking for a party. They were escaping the escape. That's where we meet Vickey and Donnie Ward, and their three dogs.
Donnie and Vickey Ward of Smith Point, Texas, take a break by the side of Highway 59 in Houston with their 3 dogs. The Wards left their home at 10am and had been driving in gridlocked traffic all day. They're headed to east Texas to ride the storm out with family. (Andrew Locke / MSNBC.com)
The Wards had left their homes near Galveston Thursday morning, on orders to evacuate. But the family couldn’t escape the crunch of cars in front of them, which slowed their progress to a crawl.
"We've been on the road for six hours and only made it about 30 miles," Donnie Ward said.
The Wards were running their aging pickup without air conditioning to prevent overheating, which meant their panting dogs were quickly slurping through the precious water supply. They were also wasting gas while idling on the freeway – critical, because every gas station for miles had shut down.
Finally, when the oldest dog threw up all over Donnie's lap, he’d had enough. They pulled over to join the tailgate "party," claiming a small patch of roadside shade. Instead of riding out the hurricane at home, here they are, riding out the traffic jam on the side of the road, hoping by nightfall they can get started again.
The story is repeated up and down the line of cars that had pulled over. A man and his pregnant wife, escaping the heat; a family in a car with the hood up, cooling the engine after it overheated; another family pouring water into their gas tank in the hopes of squeezing another couple of miles out of the gasoline left in the tank (a very bad idea, but understandable under the circumstances).
The roadside gathering is taking place right next to an abandoned gas station that long since had stopped selling the stuff. A cashier at a nearby station, still selling water and snacks, said his pumps had run dry on Wednesday. There wasn't a drop to be had anywhere. Miles and miles of gas stations with plastic bags over their handles, operations shut down. Before anything has even happened here, Houston is a city without gas, a remarkable sight. We have to plan our movements carefully to make sure we have some way to get around after the storm hits.
"It's a great irony, for Houston to run out of gas," said our new friend J. Tom Graham, chief operating officer at Houston Community Newspapers. J. Tom has been gracious enough to take us in and let us use his newsroom north of Houston to file stories.
The gas dryout is more than irony. Houston's evacuation plan was simply for most people to drive their way to safety, to higher ground. The same for Galveston and other nearby areas in Rita’s path. But the plan effectively strangles area roads, overtaxes gasoline supplies and turns the evacuation into a snail’s race. Drivers say they are afraid they’ll run out of gas, and no one will come help them. Others wonder what they’ll do if their car breaks down.
"We saw all kinds of people just sitting in the median, car overheated," Donnie Ward says. “What are they supposed to do?”
To see the extent of the trouble, we leave the roadside gathering, and head straight into Houston, where we plan to ride out the storm. The drive is eerie – the northbound lanes, the escape route, are full of cars. The southbound lanes, into the city, are completely empty.
But after a while, there is one encouraging sign. As we pass Sam Houston Parkway, a few miles north of the city center, the seemingly endless line of northbound cars suddenly ends. From this point on, the highway and the city streets are completely clear. That was the last of the leavers, apparently. Those waiting out the traffic on the side of the road have hope for escape, it would seem.
Still, others had already given hope up after hours of trying. Later, Graham tells us his operations manager spent four hours on the road earlier Wednesday, only to give up and turn around and go back into Houston. He and his wife got home in a brisk 15 minutes and planned to ride out the storm there.
While it might seem from the highways that everyone is trying to leave, only part of Houston is under mandatory evacuation orders. And at dinner we talked to a few people who decided to stay. We ate with Graham, another local newspaper publisher named Kathleen Ballanfant, and their friends. All had decided to pass on the trek out of town, and over pork chops they debate the merits of staying vs. leaving. With the latest reports indicating Houston might be spared the worst of it, dinner party members feel confident in their choice.
Much of Houston is slightly above sea level, they argue, meaning it would never face a New Orleans-Katrina-style disaster.
"If I leave, who would put out my newspaper?" Ballanfant says.
Meanwhile, after spending a day watching news reports about fruitless efforts to leave Houston, others at the table openly wonder, "Is it even possible to evacuate a large city?"
Katrina answered that question in a horrible way; Houston's experience today has to make city planners wonder if they really have an answer. And anyone who lives in one of America's great cities and watched the news must be thinking tonight – how will we get out of our city should something terrible happen?
Or at least, they must be wondering, “How much gasoline is in the car?”
A GIANT GHOST TOWN
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