Most people around the nation will naturally remember the 2005 hurricane season for Katrina; after all, it all but destroyed one of our nation’s most historic cities. For those of us on the Texas gulf coast, the 2005 season will remembered as much for Rita as for Katrina. I won’t pretend that what we went through in Rita was nearly what the citizens of Louisiana went through in Katrina, but it was nevertheless one of the most trying and exhausting ordeals I’ve even been through.

Our Rita story started, strangely enough, on our Wedding Anniversary. September 19th was a Monday; we’d been keeping an eye on Rita over the weekend, and by Monday it was pretty clear that we needed to take action. Ever since we moved into the Pine Gulch in 2001, we had talked about buying enough plywood to cover our windows, but like many good ideas, we just never found time to follow through on it. By that Monday, it was clear that we couldn’t put off the plywood any longer.

After measuring the windows and making some quick calculations, we hopped into the van and drove just down the street to Home Depot. We found the plywood and told the man we needed thirty sheets, plus fourteen bags of Plylox spring-metal clips to secure the plywood in the window frames. One of the great things about Wendy’s Plymouth minivan is that it was designed to hold 4×8 sheets of plywood, but I didn’t think its rear springs could handle thirty sheets, so we loaded up twenty and came back later for the other ten. Our eighteenth wedding anniversary will forever be known as the Plywood Anniversary, because we spent about a thousand dollars that day.

As we drove home with the plywood, something unexpected happened. The van began to sputter and backfire. I thought maybe it was the unusually heavy load we were carrying, so after unloading the plywood, I took the empty van around the block. The sputting and backfiring continued. By now it was about five o’clock, so we hurried to call our local repair shop to see if they could look at the van and repair it in short order. They said bring it in, so we hustled it over there.

In hindsight, I wish I had started cutting and putting up the plywood that afternoon, but I decided to wait one more day to see whether the storm would turn away from us. Meanwhile, I learned that just an hour after we bought our plywood at Home Depot, a long line had formed, and the store had started rationing the plywood, limiting costumers to ten sheets each. At least I bought early enough.

Monday night Wendy got on the computer, and on the phone, to try to find a hotel that (a) wasn’t too far away, (b) would take pets, and (c) still had rooms available. It took a while, but eventually Wendy found us rooms in Temple, Texas. Wendy and Jackie had been coordinating their plans, and so Jackie made reservations for her crew at the same hotel.

On Tuesday I went to work as usual and kept an uneasy eye on the weather reports. But the storm didn’t turn, and so when I came home Wendy and I decided it was time to start putting up the plywood. I started that afternoon, and got through five or six of the front windows before I quit for the evening.

We also knew we had a problem with the upstairs windows; my old 20-foot aluminum extension ladder wouldn’t reach the tops of our upstairs windows, and wasn’t sturdy enough to hold both me and a sheet of plywood. So we borrowed our neighbor’s Yukon, drove down to Home Depot, and bought a 30-foot fiberglass extension ladder: more than tall enough, and very sturdy.

Wednesday morning around 7 AM, I started into the plywood again. It was slow going, because I had to measure each window individually before cutting the plywood. If I was just nailing up the plywood over the windows, I wouldn’t have needed to take that kind of care, but with Plylox, the plywood sheets need to fit fairly snugly into the window frames. To make matters worse, our front windows have arched tops that needed to be covered. I was able to approximate the curve with some simple straight cuts, but every one took time.

By early afternoon, I had finished the front windows. By that time, the heat was nearly unbearable. It was late September, but September can be one of the hottest months in the Houston area. Temperatures were in the high nineties: 98, 99, and I remember hearing one report that day of 101 degrees. I was sweating up a storm, but I was also drinking lots of water. I thought it would keep me hydrated, but I later learned that I was wrong.

Sometime that morning or early afternoon, we went to pick up the van. It turned out that we had never replaced the plugs, plug wires, distributor cap, or distributor rotor on its engine, so the shop had given it a major tune-up and then it ran fine. They also had checked the A/C and looked at the belts and hoses to ensure we wouldn’t break down on the roadside during the evacuation.

The front windows had been fairly easy, so naturally the back windows were nearly impossible, at least the upstairs back windows. The front of our house, and the first story in back, are brick, so the windows are set into neat openings that work well with the Plylox. Upstairs in the back, though, the exterior finish is Hardy Plank siding, and the windows are set flush with the siding, so the Plylox can’t be used.

My plan for the back windows was to simply hoisty the plywood up, and use deck screws to attach the plywood to the window frames. The problem I didn’t anticipate, though, was in hoisting the plywood. The rear upstairs windows rise all the way up the soffits. The obvious way to hoist the plywood was to set a screw-eye into the soffit, thread a rope through it, and use the rope to hoist the plywood. The problem with this plan was that the soffits are finished with a relatively soft material, and the screw eyes were pulling out of the soffits as soon as I tugged on the rope.

So instead of putting the screw eye into the soffits, I had to mount it into the top of the window frame. Now I had another problem: because the windows in the back are four feet wide, and over six feet high, I had to overlap the plywood sheet at the top and bottom of the window, because the plywood wasn’t wide enough to overlap the sides of the window. Here’s the problem: I could mount screw eye in the top of the window frame, but I needed to be able to pull the plywood sheet up higher than that screw eye. If the rope is tied to the top of the plywood sheet, it just won’t work.

After puzzling over this for a while, I hit on a solution: I drilled two one-inch holes into the plywood sheet about a foot down from its top. I looped the rope between these two holes, and then threaded it up through the screw eye. With this arrangement, I could hoist the plywood up high enough that its top could be screwed to the top of the window frame. That trapped the rope in between the plywood and the window frame, but all I had to do then was just cut away the end of the rope.

This arrangement worked, but hauling those sheets of plywood, six in all, up to those windows and fastening them in place was exhausting work. Any other time covering those upstairs windows would have been a project all by itself, but with a storm bearing down on us, we had to keep working. It was dark, sometime after 9 PM, by the time we had the last of the plywood up.

With the windows covered, it was time to load all the loose stuff from the back yard into the house. The new grill, the lawn furniture, the umbrellas, the plants, the hammock, and all the other loose odds and ends in the back yard had to be brought into the house. The next few hours are a blur, but I know that we loaded the minivan, made a quick video tape inventory of all our tools, computers, and appliances, and somewhere during that time we ate a quick supper.

At 11:30 PM, with the van all packed up, we got in and drove away. We had with us: clothes and toiletries for several days; my 1TB offsite backup disk; several cases of bottled water; snacks; bread, meat, and cheese for making sandwiches; our camera and camcorders; some cash; and a lockbox containing important papers. Each of us also brought some amusements: Summer had her CD player and CDs; Bryn brought her Gameboy and games; Wendy brought books; I brought a backpack full of stuff, most notably my Sony Vaio laptop. In addition to the humans, we also brought our two shelties and our two foster shelties, loaded into two crates in the back of the van.

If you watched the national news that week, you probably saw a story about the horrendous traffic jams on the roads leading out of Houston. You probably saw lanes full of cars, vans, and trucks all loaded up but going nowhere. The management of the evacuation was a complete disaster. Contra-flow lanes were not opened up until way too late to do any good; with all that traffic, I’m not sure they would have made a significant difference even if they were opened early, but at least the plan should have been in place. Gasoline shortages were the worst problem. There was no gas to be found anywhere. (I heard a report just today that officials are making plans to have free gas available next time, but that won’t solve the availability problem.)

Traffic moved at a crawl when it moved at all. After 12 hours, we had traveled just 58 miles and had only about a quarter of a tank of gas left. About that time we had reached Prairie View on US 290 west of Houston. On a whim, we decided to get off the main roads to try to find a less crowded route. We needed to reach Texas highway 36 so we could head north to Temple, and we thought we might get there faster if we got off the main road and onto the back roads, so we headed south on 159 hoping to skirt quickly over to 36 in Bellville.

The going was good for a few miles, but just shy of Bellville we ran into gridlock again. We were now well below a quarter tank of gas and were really beginning to worry. A major storm was bearing down on us, and we were about to run out of gas on the side of the road. Wendy and I began to talk about what we would do when the tank finally ran dry.

Going through Bellville turned out to be a fortunate decision. The people of Bellville were great. On the road into town, a family was sitting out in front of their country home handing out free water and lemonade to passing motorists. When we got into Bellville, we saw a guy walking up and down the side of the road with a sign reading “Yes, we have gas!” The wait took forever; we probably waited in line two hours to get gas. People were trying to cut into line, but the local police were out directing traffic, and when they saw a couple of cars cut in front of us, the officers came over and ran those folks off. It was a long wait, but I have never been so relieved to get a fillup. At that point I realized we were probably going to make it to Temple after all.

From Bellville to Temple, it was just a matter of patience. Traffic was extremely heavy the rest of the way, but it moved a bit better than on the first part of the trip - we might have averaged 20 MPH over the last ten hours of our trip, instead of the 5 MPH we averaged in the first twelve hours. It was just past 11 PM Thursday when we finally pulled up at our hotel, and probably past midnight night by the time we got everything into the hotel room.

We’d been over forty hours without sleep, and needless to say, we were all exhausted. After sleeping very late the next morning, I felt a little bit better, but I was still very tired. Just getting up and walking down the hall to the ice machine left me exhausted. I was beginning to wonder whether something was seriously wrong with me. I’ve never felt so weak in my life. Jackie had the answer: I was dehydrated. All that sweating I had done on Wednesday had left me short of water and electrolytes, in spite of all the water I had been drinking.

Wendy went out and bought me a half-gallon of gatorade. I sat down with it and drank a couple of glasses. I didn’t feel thirsty, but the gatorade was soaking into me like water into a sponge, so I drank another glass. Before I knew it, I had downed the entire half-gallon. I didn’t feel better right away, but after a night’s sleep I was feeling like my old self again.

The next few days are a blur. We were all testy and we had some squabbles, but we managed to endure. It helped to have Jackie, Fred, and their gang close by. On Sunday, we decided to come on home, although the official return plan had us waiting until Monday before coming back. The trip back was relatively short and sweet; we ran into heavy traffic once, but for the most part we were able to move at the speed limit.

All this might not have been so bad, except that Mother Nature thumbed her nose at us and steered the storm well to the east of Houston. We didn’t see a single drop of rain during our trip, and our neighbor, who stayed home, said there was no substantial rain at the house either. The Rita weather maps said that the wind in Pearland almost reached tropical-storm force, but no worse.

In hindsight, was it worth it? Perhaps. I got a nice new ladder, which I have used several times since Rita. I now have plywood cut to fit all my windows, so I’m ready for the next storm. With my plywood prepared, it will probably take me less than four hours to put up plywood the next time.

Will we evacuate the next time a storm is on the way? That’s a hard call. If it’s a category 4 or 5 storm, and the forecast has it bearing dead-on for Houston, then yes we probably will evacuate again. For a category 3 storm, I’m not sure… we’ll debate that when the time comes.

What will we do different next time we do evacuate? We already have bought spare gas tanks for the minivan; today I’ll go out and fill them up and will keep them full throughout hurricane season. When I put up my plywood next time, I’ll drink plenty of gatorade. I’ll also make a better inventory of our home, complete with serial numbers, and will store the records and tape in our safe-deposit box, wrapped in watertight plastic.

As of last summer, we had been living in the Houston area for over nineteen years, and in all that time, Rita was our first evacuation. There were some close calls, like Gilbert in 1988, but until Rita we’d never actually had to bug out. What I’m hoping is that we can go another nineteen years until the next evacuation. The odds aren’t in favor of it, but until I put some time between myself and September of 2005, I’m going to be very reluctant to endure another evacuation.

Here’s hoping for clear weather this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 4:27 am and is filed under Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.