One Aging Geek

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Running from Rita: part 1 preparing

Author's note: this series of posts is a first person account of a few days dealing with Hurricane Rita. The posts are all written after the fact but I will try not to let that ruin the story.

Tuesday, September 20 I'm in a class all this week at work so am at our facility but not in my office. I'm still keeping track of email. Two people so far have mailed me PDFs of the Houston evacuation routes.

After class the talk is all of where to go and how soon to get out. People are in very nearly a full scale panic. At first I really think they're crazy. At this point the storm could hit literally anywhere on the Gulf coast. Just as I sit down to my desk I get a call from my daughter (grown up, married, lives and works in Houston). She has made hotel reservations in Dallas, somewhere that take pets. She and her husband have a cat, we have a cat and a dog. While I think it's overkill I agree that we should head up there. The reservations are for Friday and Saturday night.

I'm starting to think I'm the one who is crazy. Everyone around wants out of town.

Wednesday, September 21

Mrs Aging Geek and I live in a suburban community to the south of Houston. We are just off the edge of the mandatory evacuation Zone C. People in the next community to our east including a lot of our friends and our church are in Zone C and are to begin evacuating tomorrow. Hurricane Rita is just crossing the tip of Florida. The projected path from the National Hurricane Center has it making landfall at Matagorda Bay, about 90 miles southeast of us. A "miss" to our west is very bad, as bad or worse than a direct hit. The counterclockwise circulation brings the worst rain, strongest winds, and the storm surge up the east side of hurricanes in this area. They're projecting this to be a strong category 4 when it makes landfall. And of course "landfall" is something of a joke. Everyone tracks the eye and of course that's where the worst of it is but a storm of this size will have hurricane force winds up to 100 miles from the eye. With its speed that means that anyone near the path of the eye will be in those winds for many hours.

We have decided to leave. Our neighborhood is already starting to look empty as lots of others have made the same decision. I've been in this house over 20 years but never have had anything to board up the windows. And today is way too late. Last night on the way home from work I stopped in the nearby Lowe's store and there was nothing resembling plywood to be had. Today they are still getting trucks in but there is a line that stretches across the outside of the store and it looks like they're selling it straight off the truck. Not very many of our neighbors are boarding up, more are just piling themselves and their pets into a vehicle and hitting the road.

The Kroger where we buy groceries is slightly crowded and people have a strained look. Luckily they have lots of bottled water. We lay in a supply of bottled water and food that can be eaten out of the can in a pinch. Also some cleaning supplies for the aftermath.

The rest of the day is devoted to "battening down". All the outside furniture goes into the garage along with other loose items that could become missiles. Potted plants are all crammed into the corner on the side of the house with no windows, a narrow area between our house and the fence that separates our yard from our neighbor's yard.

Late in the day my daughter calls again. A co-worker who is from Bryan has relatives who are out of town and who are willing to let us stay in their house. We decide to do this for two reasons, it's a lot close than Dallas (120 miles versus about 250) and because we can leave tomorrow instead of having to wait until closer to when our reservations are. In addition to the four of us, my daughter's in-laws and two grandparents will be going. The in-laws have two cats and a dog. So our group will have a total of eight people, four cats, and two dogs.

With the time to leave changed our preparations get a little more hurried. Upstairs inside the house we deal with the computers. We have one of our own, two from my work plus a laptop and assorted gear including a 200GB USB external drive. After doing some dumping to DVD and to the laptop, the computers get disconnected and put in garbage bags. The bags go up on a couch covered with cushions. The external drive will go with us. I'm trying to figure the damage scenarios. Will the roof get torn off exposing the upstairs to rain and wind or will water rise flooding the downstairs?

We're both kind of wandering thru the house. I have this feeling that I won't see it again. Pictures from the aftermath of other hurricanes keep running through my head. People sifting through the rubble that used to be their home. As we pick out clothes to take I'm thinking not just of what I might need for the next few days away but also about what I might want with me if all I have is what I carry out tomorrow. Most of our photos are digital so are in several places, a copy on the external drive, a copy on DVD backups, some on my laptop. I go thru the photos in the living room pulling them out of their frames and stacking them. We've also gathered important papers, passports, insurance policies, bank info and the like and put it all in zip lock baggies.

We'll leave about 9:00 tomorrow morning. For the evening we sit glued to the TV compulsively watching the news and weather channel people say the same things over and over and still make them sound like something different. Very little sleep this night.