It was four in the afternoon on a hot day in September; the records say it was the 21st. The only thing I remember is that we prepared as a family to leave the city of Houston, in response to a mandatory evacuation in anticipation of Hurricane Rita’s possible arrival.
It was the year 2005, barely three weeks earlier Hurricane Katrina had caused a tragedy in New Orleans. Then, with those fresh images, the news of the arrival of a possible hurricane, now toward Houston, caused panic among residents and authorities, who at all costs wanted to avoid a situation like the one that had just occurred in Louisiana.
Since September 19, all residents of the coast near our region had been ordered to evacuate, and thus gradually it reached the place where I lived with my family.
To begin with, it was the first time evacuating; a few years earlier we had endured the terrible floods from Tropical Storm Allison, but that did not cause as much fear as Katrina.
Like my family, millions of people were doing the same, fleeing what was forecast to be a Category 5 hurricane.
Getting into the car with a few of our belongings, mostly some clothes and the necessary documents, not once did it occur to us that we were embarking on what would become one of the experiences that would mark us and that at that moment became a very difficult challenge.
Our goal was to reach Dallas, where we would be welcomed by acquaintances, usually those who live here in Space City. We are used to traveling to that city and it takes us about three and a half to four hours.
On that occasion it was 27 hours, with the car crawling; at times we were completely stopped, unable to move even a few meters.
Just like us, according to state records, between 2.5 and 3.7 million people were evacuated and left everything behind to put Rita out of harm’s way.
The evacuation routes in Texas were overwhelmed by the volume of unexpected traffic despite the implementation of the state’s traffic management plan, which aimed to speed the flow of traffic northward away from the storm surge areas.
The uncertainty about whether to use contraflow on the highways leading to San Antonio and Dallas caused delays in its implementation; the use of contraflow was not part of the state evacuation plans and previously state officials considered it too complex logistically and laborious. Finally, it was implemented on Interstate 45 and Interstate 10, but it took 12 hours to be fully in place.
Travel times ranged from 12 to 36 hours, we faced shortages of fuel, water, food and medical care, as well as temperatures reaching 100 °F with high humidity.
The mass evacuation was deadly; 107 evacuees died, a figure far higher than the number of people who died directly from Rita’s forces and that represents the majority of the hurricane’s deaths.
Many died as a result of heat exhaustion-related factors, aggravated by traffic congestion, and 23 residents of a nursing home died in the bus fire near Dallas.
Today, 20 years later, we reflect on that experience and at the same time we ask ourselves if we are prepared for another mass evacuation and if we have learned something that we can improve.
