Hurricane Rita 10 Years Ago Today - What Were You Doing?

I remember riding my bike around some shopping centers that afternoon in Cypress. Everything was closed and hardly anyone was around. It was strange and exciting. Like having the town all to myself. Came home, put some cardboard and duct tape on the windows, charged up the the laptop and got on CF. Then it sprinkled for a few hours and I think my patio chair tipped over.

 

Sorry to hear that. How's the patio chair doing nowadays?

 

That was the first time I was really concerned about a storm coming through. I think it hit CAT 5 in the evening and I kind of freaked out a little bit. We decided to stay home and ride it out because the freeway was completely stacked. I remember driving up to The Woodlands after the storm and with all the lights out all over town it was spooky as hell.

 

The best part was being offline and disconnected for 3 days with no work or worries. Quite peaceful.

 

I was spending 15 hours in my truck driving to college station to stay with my then GF. Finally got there and it didn't even rain lol. Plenty of secks and drinking though.

 

Thank you. Ironically it split from sun exposure a few years later.

 

I had a bunch of family friends coming from Houston, 3 or 4 different families all stay over at our place in Round Rock. People were sleeping all over the place. Floors of the living room, dining room, game room. We only have a 3 bedroom two story house.

 

^ Similar situation. All of us Houston folks met up at my cousin's house in San Antonio. Thank goodness he had a big place.

If you ignore the hellacious drive and the circumstances, it was nothing more than a fun family reunion.

 

I was in Austin wondering what the f*** was taking my parents so long to get there.

 

I was very lucky. My ex and I lived at Beltway/Briar Forest and we decided to head to Wichita, KS where she had family since we obviously had some time off. I remember getting gas right by our apartment and seeing the traffic going north at a stop. South was fine. They had just completed construction on Westpark Tollway, so we got on that and made it to Fulshear with very minimal traffic. Followed 1093 along to Wallis, crossed stopped traffic on 36 and took it to Eagle Lake. Had some traffic on 90A, took that to Hallettsville, then 77 north to Waco, 35 north to Wichita. What should've been about a 9-hr trip in normal conditions ended up only being 11. It's one of my prouder moments, to be completely honest.

 

Katrina was part of it, but not all of it. We don't have levees and we don't live in a soup bowl surrounded by water that's higher than us.

Wind was the issue here for Houston...though storm surge for everyone south of here would have made Ike look like a high tide. You had level headed minds like Eric Berger with the Chronicle saying, "unless this thing takes a substantial turn in the next 14 hours or so, you're looking at Houston's literal worst case scenario." That was indicative of what was going on...and honestly, that's not sensationalism. A Cat 5 making landfall on the coast near where this thing was tracked to would be absolutely devastating.

At this point...after Ike...I'd get the hell out for nearly any hurricane that I thought had a chance to keep the power out for a while. Because it sucks to stick around for a week or so while you burn up waiting for them to turn your power on. No reason to go through that if you have family north of here.

 

Had a near threesome the following night then went to Austin for 5 days since the office was closed. Great times.

 

Had plans to go to ACL Saturday and Sunday. Went to my parents' house Thursday night, which took over two hours for a normally half-hour drive. Woke up, saw the storm missed us, headed for ACL a day early. The roads were empty and I've never driven to Austin so quickly.

 

Did the other guy back out?

 

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=101934&highlight=hurricane+rita

I get bored and read the old threads where errone was spazzing out and laugh now.

 

I live a couple of blocks from Beltway 8 West. I had to run up the feeder road to Walgreens to get some prescriptions, and there right in front of me, was total chaos and panic, really a total breakdown of civilization.

It was like driving by a science fiction nightmare. All I could do was sing

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I worked on the evac hotline and *wow* when the storm made that turn and everyone headed to Louisiana was suddenly in the crosshairs and stranded on I-10 out of gas it was pure panic. I thought there was going to be hundreds of deaths -- I really don't understand how they got all those people off the road.

It was truly madness.

 

Was in College Station. Had to work the day Rita came through, remember the day before the bosses basically telling me unless everything was completely flooded out I had to make it in. We had a nice overcast day that day, didn't see a drop off rain.

 

We had a hurricane party. But my end of the street lost power & we didn't get it back for 6 days.

 

We left Houston around 8, 9 pm the night everyone was leaving. We knew traveling North on I-45 or West on I-10 was bad so we headed East on I-10 as far as we could go and then turned North.
We drove near speed limit until we got close to Beaumont. When we turned North, we ran into traffic from Beaumont going North and got stuck in traffic for several hours. It was bad but we did move along slowly. After 2, 3 am the traffic cleared up and we had smooth sailing into Shreveport before sunrise. Didn't stay there long because we heard the storm were heading to Shreveport, we drove up to Arkansas and took a mini vacation in Little Rock.

We also beat the traffic back. When we knew the storm were heading up LA, we came back thru Dallas and South on I-45. Close to Houston there were more traffic so we turned West and came back thru College Station. Not a lot of traffic but it wasn't easy finding gas stations.

When we got in Houston, the place was still mostly deserted, there were some downed tree branches on the road and traffic lights were out at many places. It was an interesting experience.