I have loved ones in Corpus Christi. Predictions are that Rita will be a Cat 4 monster by landfall, and Corpus is definitely within the prediction cone. Even if Rita hits Galveston/Houston directly, Corpus will be on the “nasty” side of the storm, which at Cat 4 won’t be pretty. I’m packing things now to head out from here (Kansas City) very, very early Thursday morning so I can get in late Thursday night to help them evac out. I’m hoping the outbound roads won’t yet be closed to incoming traffic late Thursday night…
Houston Dopers, y’all be careful and don’t wait until they start mandatory evacuations if you don’t have to…
Remember that the frontage road that goes under the Beltway at I-10 floods even in medium strength storms. I saw a car drowned down there last year during a quickie storm. I still have a lot of friends in Houston, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on everything there. I am supposed to be in Houston next weekend. I’ll be crossing my fingers, hoping the storm misses you!
ladybug, Conroe is north of Houston, which is north of Galveston. Your distance calculations are about right but I wouldn’t worry about your family too much yet. That’s a pretty good distance away from the beach. I’m sure they’ll get tons of wind and rain but they should be ok. 
when i went to galveston for the centenial of the 1900 storm, i made sure i did not go during hurricane season. i felt ironic kharma could be in the offing, esp. with a chance at a named storm of isaac. i’m figuring anyone who lives there knows the history and won’t stay on the island for this one.
i saw a walmart in galves. getting shopped to pieces, in anticipation of rita. that walmart is where an orphanage was wiped off the earth in 1900. only 3 kids survived from that orphanage. you don’t forget that sort of thing. rita will be very close in strength to the 1900 storm.
i am getting a bit tired of the news reports of the mayor of new orleans doing an about face, or reversal, or whatever. what is the man to do? he has a city that could go under water with a bit of rain! with a hurricane heading for the gulf, of course he is saying hold off! what did y’all expect him to say? come back for another chance at being killed by a cat 4 or 5 storm??
i’m figuring most people just want to see what happened to their house, if there is any little thing they can take away with them. most won’t stay around long when they see the mold that is living in their house. very, very, very, scary mold… they will just look and leave.
good luck florida and texas! this girl is really spinning.
Actually, DirkGntly, the “nasty” side of a hurricane is the east side of the eye, with the northeast quadrant being the worst. So if the storm hits Galveston/Houston directly, Corpus will be far enough to the west to probably avoid the really bad stuff.
Everyone, please stay safe, and don’t take any chances – this storm looks to be turning really, really nasty really, really fast. Here’s hoping there’s some cool water before it comes ashore to lower the intensity before landfall!
We’re still not sure what we’re going to end up doing here (Lake Charles, LA) but there should be something definite in a day or two.
I have loved ones in Baytown, Victoria, and Seadrift (a small coastal town near Port O’Connor), Texas. I hope they are making plans to be out of Rita’s path. I’ll be keeping in touch with them as much as I can. They’ve worried about me through Ivan and Dennis, I guess now it’s my turn to worry about them. 
I read the book called “A Weekend In September”, which was about that storm. Yikes.
We’re heading off to Wimberley wednesday to get out of the area. My 7 y.o. son, who is very afraid on tornados, is completely freaked out about this. Even though we tried to shield him from the news, it was all the talk at school today as they have closed for the week. He told us his “heart hurts”.
At least we won’t be having it as rough as our twice-moved La neighbors.
I don’t think this could have happened at a worse time, really. I suppose there is no real good time to have a Class 4 hurricane hit your city, but I can gripe that it is inconveniencing me because I really matter, right?
- I have my Family Medicine core clerkship exams from tomorrow to Friday. I don’t want them to reschedule them.
- A relocated Tulane medical student is arriving on Thursday to live with us. Their orientation in the Texas Medical Center (a flood zone) will start barring complications on Saturday. He’s driving back from San Diego now, and I can’t get in contact with him to tell him to keep close contact in case Tulane Medical School needs to once again get relocated somewhere else, along with Baylor and UT-Houston this time…
- I’m going to Austin on Friday afternoon for the Austin City Limits festival. If I have to miss that to relocate my family/basten down the hatches here, I’m going to be royally, royally pissed.
- We bought a house (didn’t flood in Allison!) 1 street away from the bayou 2 years ago.
- My wife is 8 months pregnant.
- I have an 18 month old daughter.
I went to Sam’s today to get the Lost DVD and it was a madhouse. I got swept up in it all and bought some more water and a first aid kit. A really cool one for $20, can serve up to 70 people they say. We have storm windows and D-cells and canned food so if we need to bivouac around here we can. But my wife, 8 months pregnant and a human space heater in the mid-90s humidity of Houston, will kill me in about 1 hour of no air conditioning. She’s already told me so, and already told me which knife in the kitchen she will use and where she will stab me. The baby, she’ll probably drown. That’s how we do it in Houston.
Anyway, I’ve been through Alisha, Chantal, a few others, and of course Allison. Allison was a real doozy, two tropical storms in one week basically. I was leaving for Siberia on that Sunday after the Friday when the shit hit the fan. Friday night/Saturday morning, watched the water come up in our never-flooded street to the top of my lawn before it began to recede. So then, like a moron, I took my wife’s small SUV and went out and looked at the city and very nearly got my ass stranded on the 610 as there was nowhere to turn around. Retrograde traffic on 610, standing water to the far left lane in Bellaire. The 59 overpass was a lake as far as the eye could see in both directions. I had to drive through 2 feet of water at the Westheimer underpass. People call me humble because I will never admit to being reasonably intelligent. Whatever evidence they present me, though, I just think back to the night of 6/8-9/01 and I have demonstrable evidence that I am a giant moron.
I went on Saturday to school (I was in a research lab then), but they were only letting in animal workers and primary investigators. Some of my grad student friends who work with mice got in to help their bosses. One girl spent 4 hours knee-deep in standing water in the basement, fishing out thousands of transgenic mouse carcasses which drowned when the animal facility flooded. A cow was moved into the President of the medical school’s bathroom. On Sunday, before my flight left, I finally got in and helped determine which experiments would be sacrificed and which things were crucial and 100% needed to be moved into incubators with emergency power. We were lucky to even have emergency power, only 2 out of 5 or 6 buildings had it. A famous investigator at Baylor is from Beirut, and she was running the show. She had a bullhorn and was giving instructions about emergency power “Do not plug power strips or extra plugs or non-crucial appliances into red emergency power sockets! It will cause a brown-out! I know! I’ve been in Beirut! We will not let you in the building unless you have a flashlight and a cellphone!” There was no light, there was no A/C. Flies start to heat shock and die at 30 degrees C, when we got to the fly room, it was 29.5 deg C. Our next generation of flies had all heat-shock phenotypes (N[sup]ts[/sup] is on TM3 if anyone is interested). The school was closed for 2 weeks (while I was in Siberia). When I came back, all of my friends had dry-ice burns on their forearms from carrying blocks of dry ice up to all floors in our 9 story building to pack non-emergency power incubators. There is still damage in the med center from Allison – the basements of most buildings are still closed, undergoing mold remediation and installation of flood doors which look like the blast doors on Cheyenne Mountain…
No thanks. Not again. I’m leaving this swamp for somewhere safe, like San Francisco.
Boy, Katrina sure got peoples’ attention. Five days before expected landfall and Sam’s club was sold out of bottled water at noon today.
I’ve just gotten off the phone with my 88 year old mother, who insists she wants to stay. I think I’ve convinced her, but I told her I’d give her until tomorrow to think about my offer to pop her on a plane and get her out of here. Then I’m going to insist. But where to send her? Both of my siblings are out of pocket (New Mexico) and the only other candidate is my cousin, who lived in New Orleans until Katrina and is now sharing a room with a co-worker in Baton Rouge. Maybe it’ll just be a few days in a hotel anywhere I can get her a ticket for.
While I’ve ridden out a Cat. 5 before, I sure don’t want to. I think I’ll be OK for a Cat. 3 (as was Alicia), but…, when do you know?
John F, let me advise you of my cousin’s experience. She left NO 24 hours before landfall and the normally 6 hour trip to Houston took 17 hours. If the entire metropolitan area of Houston is trying to drive away, a 24 hours in advance departure may have you riding it out in your car on 59 or I-45. I don’t know if you want to try I-10.
Whatever comes, it won’t be as bad as New Orleans. But it could still be very bad.
I remember a post somebody made here about 4 or 5 years ago before the anticipated arrival of some badass hurricane in Florida asking which wall was best to shelter by when the storm hit. One reply was, paraphrased, “The wall of your hotel room in Atlanta.”
Y’all take care.
I hear ya.
It’s hard to figure out exactly what we are going to do (other than leave) but plans are in high gear and we will bail out ASAP.
I grew up down there in Freeport Texas, just south along the coast from Galveston Island. If this storm comes in there and Brazoria County gets a direct hit it could be really nasty. Most of that area is at or inches above sea level. My parents sold the house and moved up north of Dallas a few years ago simply because it seemed likely that area was due for a major storm. There are levees around most of the town and a huge floodgate at the mouth of Brazos Harbor but after Katrina I have my doubts about how well that will all work.
I was under the impression that it’s the “front right” quadrant of the storm (looking down the track of the hurricane) that’s the nasty side. So if you’re looking down the hurricane track toward Texas (as if the hurricane were “facing” Texas), the front right quadrant of Rita would be the northwest side of the storm. East of the eye would actually be the “back” of the storm. Katrina’s nasty side during landfall in NO would’ve been the northeast side.
Either way though, Corpus Christi won’t get the worse side if it hits near Galveston/Houston.
People stay safe! We’re all keeping an eye on this one!
Reading this and your location tag is, kinda funny. Not to make light of your situation.
Be safe US Dopers. And be cautious.
Thanks, Jaade. I’ve been worried about this storm ever since I heard it was likely to be a category 4 at landfall.
My mom plans to call my aunt and uncle this morning, but we’re worried that my aunt won’t want to leave her dogs. My cousin lives just down the street in another mobile home, and she has a mentally handicapped son who is physically violent. I can’t imagine how (or if) she could deal with him in a shelter. I’m hoping they’re far enough inland so that they won’t need to evacuate.
I’m sending my wife and daughter out tonite to my parents house 175 miles north along with a carload of unreplaceables, photo albums, family heirlooms, etc. Gonna be a strange feeling indeed putting that together and seeing them depart. Hopefully this will miss the apex of the migration out.
The house is stocked with the essentials plus things I’d need to limit damage during the storm and perform a rapid fix after so I’m going to monitor a combination of hurricane strength and proximity and stay or go based on that. A nearby 3 will be the swing point. Anything more direct or stronger and I’m history… err… out of here.
Thanks AbbySthrnAccent for the surge map.
One thing I would like to see… anyone have a link to something similar (Cat Level vs Distance) for inland winds? I Google like a chimp.
Okay, here’s something pretty basic… a Maximum Envelope Of Winds, or MEOW.
Well that was pretty frightening.
I remember riding out Alicia and this thing looks to be worse. Don’t wait too late folks, get out while you can.
According to my hubby, veteran of multiple typhoons ranging up to 200+ mph in the western Pacific, as the hurricane is moving forward, looking ahead to where it’s going with straight ahead being due north, the northeast quadrant is the worst, but anything on the east side of the eye wall will get more than the west side. It’s due to the counterclockwise rotation of storms in the northern hemisphere.
So if the storm moves between Corpus and Houston, Houston will be the ones to worry. Whereas when Katrina moved so that the eye passed 20 miles east of New Orleans, New Orleans had far less actual storm damage than the areas immediately to its east.
Let me second Ringo’s advice. A year ago we evacuated New Orleans in the false alarm evacuation for Ivan, and a normal 2-hour trip took 17 hours. This year’s Katrina evacuation went far better because they did a massive revamp of the plans based on the Ivan clusterf***. I don’t know how much recent experience Houston has had with a massive evacuation, but unless it’s very recent and lessons were learned, I’d advise leaving 12-24 hours ahead of the recommended departure time. And leave at 3 am – that will help you face the lightest possible traffic. If I’d left just 6 hours earlier during Ivan, I would have made my 17-hour trip in 3-4 hours at most.
So please, learn from my lessons: Leave early, and leave at an off-peak time of day. And take a portable bathroom facility in the car with you just in case you do get stuck in a traffic jam and every bathroom within miles is boarded up!!!
Here’s a Houston real time traffic map to assist with anyone’s evacuation timing. As you’ll notice, the area of focus can be repositioned to accurately reflect your area of interest.
To this uneducated eye, it suggests the evacuation of Galveston and surrounding environs is already well underway.
My husband’s boarding up his store and heading home from the storm surge zone. I’m worried that it’ll be flooded, but they’e doing the best they can to protect it.
My only real concern now is that a tornado will tear the roof off our apartment. All the rest of my relatives are evacuating to my old hometown of San Angelo, about 360 miles west of here. My grandmother has a house there, so they’ll be fine and comfy.
My office is likely to close on Friday. We’re gonna ride it out at home. I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine. I’m just glad it’s not hitting tonight, because I’d be really pissed if I missed the premiere of *Lost * tonight.