Thanks, neuro, I’m leaving now. See y’all on the other side.
Bush, I believe.
How long until Pat Robertson says the destruction of Crawford is God’s revenge for choosing the wishy-washy John Roberts for Chief Justice?
d&r
Well, my sister lives in New Orleans so she’s already evacuated up here. My brother and his wife are residents at Baylor in Houston so in normal circumstances they’d both be activated to go into the hospitals in case of injuries but they’re in Hawaii visiting her parents and aren’t scheduled to be back until Saturday afternoon. So it’s rough for them.
-Lil
Flurking flurk.
We tried in earnest to get to Austin tonight. We left at 7 PM from our house in SW Houston. We took back roads most of the way up – 59S to Hwy 6 N to US90 W to 359 N up past Pecan Grove to 1093 W (a bit of a mess, took about 30 minutes to go 3 miles) to 359 N again to the Katy Freeway, which was a sight to be seen (a parking lot). Continued on 359 north (I think, I’m a bit groggy now) past Brookshire and towards Bellville with very little traffic until about 10 miles outside of Bellville. Here we hit big problems, and average 7.5 mph to Bellville (an hour and a quarter). At Bellville, we decided we would look at 157 to La Grange and if it looked good we would take it and if not, we would turn around. Unfortunately they had turned Bellville contraflow and so we all streamed through Bellville at 5 mph without a turning point. The 157 West turnoff was uuuugly so we continued straight to 36 North, with the intention of taking it to Brenham and eyeballing 290 and if not, turning around.
36 was wonderful until about 5 miles outside of Brenham where it became a parking lot. A parking lot of parking lots. We spent about an hour and went about 1 mile, if we were lucky. I eventually decided that most of these people were probably taking 290 to Austin with a few taking 36 to Waco, and that it was hopeless. So I started driving on the shoulder with the intention of turning right onto 290. But the conscientious truckers blocked my way so I just sat there for an hour. Eventually, we came to some little road and I told my father in law (concert buddy and driving partner) that if it was paved, we would take it and try by blind reckoning to cut the corner to 290. Lo and behold, it was, we did, and we found 290.
Made a right on 290 to go SE and flew back to Houston. 290 was backed up on the NW side as far as the eye could see, stopped up bumper to bumper until well before Hempstead. Funnily enough, before that, it was nearly deserted – I suppose we were seeing the bolus of people who left in the afternoon before the news came over that the hurricane turned northwards. Our side, heading to Houston, was completely empty. All of the gas stations were out of gas and swarmed with people, many lined up in the eventuality that a tanker truck would arrive.
Anyway, got back here without incident. We spent 5 hours to get to Brenham, normally a 1.25 hour drive. Not bad time considering… Unfortunately, we will miss the Austin City Limits festival. I’ll have to see Wilco, Coldplay, The Decemerists, Death Cab, Arcade Fire, Built to Spill, Bloc Party, Kasabian, Franz Ferdinand and about 12 other bands that I wanted to see another time.
We will hunker down, a street from Brays Bayou, and hope for the best. We have an upstairs room if things start getting serious. Our house hasn’t flooded and hopefully that is a streak we can keep alive.
From CNN:
Words fail.
This Hurricane sucks.
I left Houston on Wednesday and made it safely to Athens, joining the rest of my immediate family minus my father. My father stayed in Lake Jackson because of his work. He left Lake Jackson at 2 AM Thursday morning. So far, he’s made it as far as Conroe, but he’s running out of gas and no gas is available. He’s still going to try to make it to Athens. Depending on how far north he gets, my uncle and I might try to take some gas down to him.
There are no hotels available. If he gets stuck down there I don’t know where he’ll go.
He’s probably safer in his truck in Conroe than in his house in Lake Jackson, though.
It appears that some people are not well versed in Texas geography. If Rita was a Cat 9*, it might make it the 200 some odd miles inland** with enough force to break a few tree limbs in Crawford.
*Yes, I know there are no Cat 9 hurricanes.
** You will need to zoom out to see just how far Crawford is from the coast.
Yet.
It’s not heading for Crawford anyway. It’s heading my way. And it’s going to be a tropical storm when it gets here, which makes for some ugly but not really destructive weather.
Well, after 12 hours waiting at the airport, my sister’s delayed flight as well as her husband’s (they were forced to buy separate itineraries) were both cancelled. They’re back home (near Spring, or N.Houston) with the two boys and are going to wait it out (since driving was out of the question). Fortunately, several of their neighbors are around, so they won’t be alone out there. Still… 
My wife’s colleague was leaving Houston so took a cab to the airport–under ordinary circumstances a 1/2-hour drive. It took 8 hours, and the fare was over $400, but he got out OK.
Sometimes you just can’t win. New Orleans’ levees just failed again. The hurricane hasn’t even hit yet, for Pete’s sake!
I’m (relatively) safe at home. It took us five hours to drive ninety miles yesterday–and that was lightning-quick compared to what other folks have gone through. Some of my relatives have headed further north. So far it’s just me and my parents in the house, but who knows who may call and decide to come stay here after all.
And it appears that some people need to be versed in both a) long-range hurricane tracks* and b) sarcasm
[sub]* when I made my original post, Dallas and the region to the south were well within Rita’s projected path.
I’m well aware of the NOAA hurricane tracking graphs. I didn’t see any of them ever predict that the winds 200+ miles inland would be much above tropical storm strength.
I also get sarcasm, sorry if I seemed to pick on you. Yours was only one of several posts here that alluded to how neat it would be if Crawford was hit.
Back at home. That was quite a non-event, at least for north Houston. We got some nice wind, but next to no rain. When I left, my mother was preparing to set the sprinkler out on the lawn.
I found out, though, that an extremely close friend of my grandmother was on the bus that caught fire during the evacuation, and was killed. Put kind of a damper on the whole “yay we didn’t blow away!” thing.
We had a bit of wind and rain (it’s still pretty windy), but the power never flickered and our DirecTV signal remained perfect all night. I’ve seen much worse storms here that were just generic thunderstorms.
Later this week Houston will likely be full of returning evacuees bitching about how they left for no reason, but I prefer to think the glass if half full since there was only very light damage in our area. Hell, Clear Lake remained above water. Hail Poseidon, I say.
It’s been raining like hell for the last few hours, and the worst of it should be getting here any time now. Obviously I still have power, but it’s been blinky and I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes out. I’ll be happy if it doesn’t! There’s been some fairly good wind gusts and there’s a decent steady wind, but it’s a lot better than they thought it was going to be back when they thought Rita was going to hit as a strong 4.
So far so good, generally. The local news says there’s a lot of trees down here and there, but otherwise, the biggest worry is flooding.
I’m going to be so happy when this thing is over.
I talked to my mom earlier this afternoon. My aunt, uncle and cousins ended up staying with a friend in western Texas last night. They’re already back home. There are lots of downed trees and they don’t have power, but their mobile home is still standing (the NWS had been predicting hurricane-force winds for their area at one point).
I agree. When the evacuations started, Rita was a category 4/5 hurricane heading straigt for Galveston. IMHO, it’s better to evacuate and not have any damage than to try to ride a storm out and end up in serious danger.
Clear Lake (between Houston and Galveston) got a pretty damn good windstorm and a moderate amount of rain. Like cbawlmer already said, there was absolutely no flooding. The power did flicker a few times, but it never went out. In fact, I spent my hurricane vigil drinking a few beers and watching The Lord of the Rings saga in its entirety.
The only damage that occurred to my property is a 30-ft. long section of fence blew down; not the slats, but the 4x4 fence posts snapped like toothpicks.
The other bit of general strangeness that I observed was the lightning. Due to the extreme cloud cover, I could not see the lightning directly, even though it was close. Rather, it was diffused by the clouds (like heat lightning, but close-up) and had a distinctly greenish pallor to it. All in all it made for a rather eerie effect.