The panic behind Rita was so justified. You just had Katrina which at the time was the 2nd strongest hurricane ever in the Gulf at 175mph and 902mb( just slightly behind Camille at 175mp and 900mb) and it just devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. Now they were faced with a even more powerful Hurricane than Katrina and the new strongest hurricane ever in the gulf at 180mph and 895mb. Everyone in the projected path had a very real a justified panic.
@@Sportsandstuff851it was miserable no power for 8 days and for some people even longer. Some people still don’t have power. Pretty bad damage but not as much flooding as Harvey. Harvey was mostly a rain dump, Beryl was lots of wind
I flew into Houston TX days before Rita for the company I was working for to help prepare, ride out the storm in the basement of our plant and start the plant back up. It was very weird walking into the airport as everybody was trying to get out. People were pointing as us like we were crazy. It pushed East of the Houston area and we rode out the storm watching baseball on TV and drinking beer.
I had it will be extremely creepy/surreal.. On your way person they had to go in after Hurricane Katrina and they said it was just awful because you would think is in the obvious but it’s raw sewage everywhere, no power no, nothing where everyone was staying to get power back up, etc. But yeah, Whatever you did out there to help, I send my respect and gratitude. You have a great one!
My evacuation attempt to Dallas failed to the point that by the time I made it to Livingston just north of Houston, I ended up heading east of there to Warren which is in the region that it hit. Wish I had stayed home because I went through all of that madness just to go into it!!
Rita snapped 10 giant pine trees around our house. An oak actually hit the house but none of the large pines did. A large pine lime drove into the ground and severed our water line.
The risks have to be mitigated with these storms. Pretty much in order to get out safely. One would have to make a decision based on a very early model of the storm. The cost of staying in a hotel for what could end up being a month would be astronomical only to come back to find out either 1) house is completely gone 2) house has massive damage and what wasn’t damage was looted 3) House did not suffer any damage, but yet was looted 4) House did not experience any damage The area in Hampton Roads I have heard can take 3 to 4 days to evacuate safely😮😮😮
I remember one of the big arguments for not evacuating for Harvey, was what happened for Rita. I don't know how true that is, but that's what my Houston family thought was the reasoning. By that point, I was already watching a lot of online weather news, and new Harvey was going to be bad because of the stall, and tried to warn my family. They decided to still ride it out. Many of them have PTSD to this day because of what they went through with Harvey. Honestly, I don't know if there is really a wrong or right answer for what to do in the path of these storms. It feels like for officials, your damned if you do and your damned if you don't.
I won't evacuate again. Honestly, Harvey was a different kind of storm compared to Rita as far as path of impact and prevailing weather systems that impacted it and whatnot. You simply can't compare hurricanes. All I know is I will never evacuate like that again. I might evacuate to a more stable structure like a big brick hotel or something but I will not be attempting to evacuate to another city.
I grew up in Palestine, Tx. about 2 and a half hours north of Houston. I remember so vividly when this happened, a lot of evacuees detoured off the interstates (I assume because of the awful traffic jams) and found their way coming through our town, on the way I guess towards Dallas. Every store in our town got wiped nearly clean, and the traffic was so insane that what was normally a 15 or 20 minute drive to get from my school to my grandmother's house, in the center of town, took about 2 hours. I remember in that traffic jam seeing someone get out of their car, jump up and snatch some fruit off the branch somebody's tree that was hanging over the fence near the road, which to an elementary age kid just seemed like the biggest symbol of anarchy and chaos imaginable lol. Just a surreal experience as a kid. I had no idea the tradgedy that was unfolding on the highways outside of Houston. May all those people rest in peace
I remember this all too well. My ex-wife and I were part of this evacuation disaster. We lived in League City, and they were predicting that our area was going to get hit very hard. We prepped our apartment the best we could. After being stuck on the interstate for 12 hours barely moving, we managed to turn around and made it back to a ghost town. We caught the edge of Rita and lost power for about a day. Just a month before my ex had lost her Mom in Alabama. 2005 was not a good year for us. Oddly enough, we moved from the area exactly one week before Hurricane Ike hit the region in 2008.
Took me almost 30 hours to get to my family's house in Austin tx from Galveston. It was horrible and one reason I'm always hesitant to evacuate. During the evacuation I only ate once during that 30 hours and had limited water. When I arrived at my parents house, at nearly midnight I had a full meal waiting for me. Luckily Rita hooked a slight right and I had no damage and very little rain upon returning home.
Took me 11 hours to get from Mission Bend to Splendora, then an additional 3 hours or so to get to Livingston. Was trying to get to the Dallas area, and by the time we got to Livingston we had enough and instead decided to head east to Warren, a small town north of Silsbee and Lumberton not far from the LA border. The hurricane went right through this area while Houston was untouched!! I wish I had stayed home because it gave me nightmares for at least a year or so. Fast forward to 2008, when Ike is heading our way and I am HOTLY against evacuating! Needless to say, I stayed home and of course survived or wouldn't be here to make this comment right now.
Yes, I originally had that in and what a horrible loss that was. I read somewhere that it ended up being a multimillion dollar lawsuit. The entire event was just awful
does anyone know exactly what caused the bus to start burning? Cause i genuinely want to know and am gonna google it right afterwards Just googled it and it seems to be bc “insufficent lubrication of a rear axle” Now that u cant escape from and obv a lawsuit came out of it. A lack of care taken from a person lead to the death of 24.
Friend of mine evacuated with two large horse trailers full of horses. I think she had 10-12 horses plus quite a few dogs. They were stuck on the highway in the heat for over 24 hours,ran out of water for the horses, almost ran out of fuel. Aluminum horse trailers are like ovens when not moving, even with maximum windows open. All the horses were in pretty bad shape when she reached her destination in Lawton,OK, just across the border from TX. I was watching on TV as I had moved from Lawton a month previously and I was talking to her on the phone every few hours, feeling totally helpless.
I'm tearing up reading this because I know what it's like to be far from someone you care about and unable to help them aside from just being a listening ear. I'm sure, though, that you were a blessing to her. ❤
I lived in an apartment downtown Galveston in 2005. We evacuated early because of the horrifying things we saw on the news after Katrina, 18 hours to get to Dallas. The worst part though came after the storm. We weren't allowed back on the island for a few days and when we finally got in to try and go home we were confronted by armed guards. Black uniforms with no markings and sub-machineguns. The fear of looting and rioting was so great in Galveston that someone hired PMC dudes to patrol. They kept coming to check and make sure we were supposed to be there but refused to identify themselves or admit whether or not they were law enforcement officers, though they seemed to be detaining people they thought might be looters. Guess which people those were. Galveston has always had problems with racism but that was above and beyond.
That's truly pathetic that humans act like that. Those are the true scum. Taking advantage of people or anything is cowardly and pitiful. No true man would harm anything. Protecting is what REAL men do.
The truth hurts sometimes but it’s the truth, one group does overwhelmingly turn to looting in these situations. It’s almost always exclusively the same group no matter what. You might not like it but you better understand that it’s just a sad reality and if you choose to ignore it then it might cost you your life. Stereotypes exist for a reason, it’s because there’s always some truth in what’s being said.
I live in south texas and was 19 when this happened. It is 100% why no one wants to leave. They either get out several days from landfall or just ride it out for better or worse. It was awful seeing it on the news. Now after harvey, you might see it swing the other direction. So many people were trapped when they released the dam water, they might start evacuating again.
2005 was the year of the man-made disasters that just so happened to involve hurricanes. The deaths because of the evacuation was man made, the failures of the levees were man made, and the disastrous response after Katrina was man made.
" . . . the disastrous response after Katrina was man made." Please tell me what we did wrong. I was one of the first 'boots on the ground' at Naval Air Station New Orleans' after Hurricane Katrina. I was the Operations NCO for the Forward TOC (Tactical Operations Center) managing the logistics for Operation Katrina Relief. When we landed the decision had been made that we were going to 'accept risk' and land the airplane on a runway that was littered with hurricane debris, had no lighting and we had no communications with the ground. We literally put our lives on the line in order to get started a few hours faster. I spent the next three weeks in a state of sleep deprivation. Before we could begin distributing relief supplies, we needed to know what relief supplies were needed where. We needed to know what roads we could use to get there. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we had to do was unload the airplane. Which we literally did by hand because there was no cargo handling equipment. At tine time we got the first set of bad news that screwed up our plan. All of the fuel supplies on base had been contaminated with rainwater and were unusable. This not only meant that we were going to have to fly in fuel - but the cargo aircraft had to reduce the amount of cargo they carried because they had to carry enough fuel to get back home without refueling. And - this was a fighter base and it had no cargo handling equipment. So the first things we had to do was fly in the equipment needed to unload cargo from airplanes. Then we had to fly in enormous fuel bladders and fly in fuel to put in them. Then we had to fly in construction vehicles to dig out an area for the safe storage of that fuel. Then we had to fly in a quartermaster unit to move the supplies from the airstrip to a supply depot they set up. They then began sorting and organizing the supplies. Then we had to fly in a light Cavalry troop and send them out to map roads and determine which ones were usable and which ones weren't. Then we had to fly in even more fuel and transportation units to move the supplies. At the same time the cavalry units began making contact with any local authorities they could find and sending lists of what supplies were needed at what locations. Only then could we begin loading trucks and dispatching convoys. We knew certain specific things: How much cargo a particular type of military cargo plane could carry. How many of those planes we could park and unload at the same time. How long it took to unload an airplane and have the ramp space clear for the next airplane. Knowing all of this we could do the math and know what the maximum amount of relief supplies we could process and send forward. It was less than 40% of what was needed. You're criticizing us for failing to do the impossible.
@@colincampbell767 you aren’t the one I was criticizing. The failure to maintain the levees, the federal, city, and state leaders bickering made this worse.
@colincampbell767 I just gotta say, my hats off to you, sir. You guys don’t get enough recognition and you SHOULD! I could not even imagine! My husbands a full time FF/medic and people just have ZERO idea what you guys go through. Putting your own lives at risk to save others and people sure have something to say but I GUARANTEE you, they wouldn’t last a second doing the work you that you do. They have zero, absolutely zero room to talk or even give their opinion until they’re ready to strap up and go fight the crap you guys fight. Their minds couldn’t even go there let alone do it. I commend you and you need to hear that more.. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what it would be like to be in that situation. I would be terrified. Just know there is us folks out here (and a lot of us!) that appreciate you and know that there isn’t many people that would go the great lengths that you have, to do the job that you do. I commend you!!
Something definitely changed with the weather. I was born and raised in southeast Texas and never had to evacuate for a hurricane until Rita. As a 17yr old who had to drive ahead seperate from the rest of the family with my elderly grandmother but still got caught in traffic, it was traumatic. I get nerved up in standstill traffic to this day.
I wanna add something. They did use a panic tactic, I remember them saying if you stay, notify your next of kin. The evacuation killed more than the storm did. Go figure.
I was living in Sulphur, Louisiana when Rira hit and I also remember the authorities telling people to use a permanent marker and write their name, social security number and next of kin on their inner forearm
@@therogueveteran Yes, they did tell Bolivar that. i will never forget seeing the yellow house that was the only thing left in the wake of Ike, like the storm said "nope, not that one." And so many people didn't heed that warning and they found bodies in the bay.
"I think they could have taken action to prevent the gridlock from happening, but that's just me." Then immediately takes a sip of her drink. I don't know if it was intentional, but it was perfect.
Story time. I’ve always been fascinated by tornadoes. But I realized my mom always watched hurricanes. When I got older I realized she had to send power crews out to these places impacted. I never cared about hurricanes until then. Now I have full respect for all weather. Thank you for this video
It was the 2004 season that had me paying attention to hurricanes, being my mom was living in the Tampa Bay region at the time. I had just flew out to Kansas in May that year and Hurricane Charley was a very close call. Came ashore in Punta Gorda as a 150-mph Category 4. A cold front had moved down from the north and caused the hurricane to make the sudden right-hand turn just a few hours before landfall. Had that cold front been 50 miles farther north, the outcome would have been far worse for Tampa, especially given the RI ahead of landfall (Jumped from a 110 mph Cat 2 to a 150 mph Cat 4 within three hours).
@@norman6492 Katrina got my attention. I was trying to fly from Wisconsin to California to visit my mom and that harpy Katrina told me no. Planes were grounded but I got out the next day. When I came home I heard about all the fallout and am still learning things to this day. It seems odd that I never gave much thought to tropical storms and hurricanes since Mom's from Florida, but it makes sense when you consider I grew up in SoCal. We had quakes to be afraid of. Now I live in tornado country. Any way you look at it, nature is always trying to kill us.
4:33: One thing that is startling is that in the short time from the formation ( August 23) and later landfall( August 29th) of Katrina to the formation and naming of Rita ( September 18th), there were five other new named storms in that 26 day period. K to R in the alphabet is pretty large gap. It turned out that was the busiest hurricane season in history until 2020 with 26 named storms.
28 named storms. First time NWS had to use the Greek alphabet to name storms. The last named storm of the 2005 season was actually in January of 2006. The "season" ends November 30. Source: www.weather.gov/tae/climate_2005review_hurricanes PS Also, I was there. In southeast Florida.
We ran through the English alphabet and had to use 6 letters of the Greek alphabet - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta. Also, though the season runs from June 1 through November 30, the last named storm of the 2005 Hurricane Season was in January of 2006. There were actually 28 named storms in 2005. www.weather.gov/tae/climate_2005review_hurricanes
My dad had to go down to New Orleans and SW Louisiana to cover the devastation that Katrina and Rita brought. He wrote for a state newspaper at the time. This video does a great job at showing how destructive this season was here and in Texas, and one of the best videos I've seen on Hurricane Rita itself, a storm which really needs more attention like this. Thank you so much for making this video, it's a wonderful one, and I wish you a happy birthday today Carly.
My parents lived just west of Galveston. They evacuated to Wichita Falls, which normally takes 5-6 hours. It took 18! They weren’t mad, because my mom went through Camille in MS.
Texas will NEVER address the horrible city planning that leads to all the traffic and gridlock. The government there just adds more lanes and refuses to invest in public transportation. I grew up around NYC, I'm used to traffic. But Texas traffic is an entirely different beast. I lived there for almost a decade and the congestion in non-emergency situations is unreal. From the big cities to the small--city planning when it comes to roads is abysmal.
I was 13 at the time and lived in central Houston. My school stayed open for longer than it should have and a couple of my teachers made threats that if we evacuated early and didn't show up to class, we'd get F's on any assignments they would have given for those days. By the time our school actually shut down, traffic had started becoming backed up. I remember my mom and some of our neighbors trying to decide if we should attempt to evacuate or stay home and ride it out. In the end, we decided it was too late to evacuate and so we stayed home and prayed we'd be ok. My mom and I were scared because we had lost everything in Tropical Storm Allison 6 years prior and so we were expecting the worst. We were thankful when Rita missed us in the end. Afterwards, I heard horror stories from a lot of my classmates about how it took them 20+ hours to get out of Houston. Rita was an important lesson in evacuations though. I see a lot of people online calling people stupid if they don't immediately evacuate for a storm, and every time I tell them about Rita and why evacuations are now done the way they are.
I remember Allison. Went to work that day and the forecast was rain. By mid-morning break it was a tropical storm. It wouldn't have been as bad if it hadn't decided to back up over us again. Had a co-worker who would have been stuck in the water on the freeways if he hadn't modified his jeep for high water.
Thanks for this great video. I grew up in Houston TX and Sulphur LA, but now live in the Northeast. I remember watching all of this on TV as it unfolded, and still remember the feeling of horror right after Katrina. I’m sympathetic to the overreaction that led to mass evacuations. But I also remember hurricane scares growing up, and never truly trust a weather forecast more than 24 hours in advance. Too many storms weakened or turned at the last minute, and we sat in our boarded up house eating up all of our ice cream for nothing. It was exciting as a kid. But as a mom responsible for the safety of 4 kids now, I’m not sure what I would have done. We have family in TX far from the coast. I suspect I would have overreacted and evacuated with everyone else.
Love the hurricane coverage! Tornados get a lot of love because they're so concentrated in area and dramatic, while hurricanes are so big and broad and spread out... But they still really effect people and communities, something Rita clearly showed in so many ways.
Look up wink's coverage of Ian. They did an exemplary job for the people of South West Florida. They're lucky to have such a good weather and news team. It's a lot to watch but worth it. I especially lived how caring they were to the people in the path of that storm. It is on RUclips.
You get more warning with a hurricane. I’ve been thru 1 Cat 1 hurricane and missed on 2 stronger ones when they turned and went away from where my family lived at those times. Dad was in the navy so we moved a lot. Hurricanes were part of our lives until we moved back to northern Illinois and now had to worry about those pesky tornadoes.
I’ve been through both and the main difference is anxiety for a few minutes Vs anxiety for days. In that sense hurricanes take more of a toll on you. I describe the last hurricane I went through as going through a tornado every 5 minutes. That’s how strong the wind gusts were that it literally sounded like a tornado was hitting my house every 5 minutes. And this lasted from 5am to 2pm.
As a Vermilion Parish resident, I appreciate you covering this storm and making our story be heard. The storm surge that pushed through Pecan Island hit my grandparents’ home in Forked Island. Since then, the home is now up on 13 ft cinder blocks and I currently live in it. Thank you for covering this!!! ❤️❤️
Tool a direct hit from Rita's eyewall here in Sulphur, La. My fiance and I evacuated to Arkansas and fortunately at that time returned home to a massive mess of trees but none hit the house. Fast forward to Aug 26 2020 at 1:00am when Hurricane Laura's eyewall ended direct center atop of my home with me in it. I lost every single tree I had along with the house. Seven 90ft plus tall adult pine trees fell through the roof down to the brick.. Rita was definitely bad but it doesn't even compare to the power, wind speed, and structural damage to which Laura caused. The pressue during the passing of the dead center of Laura's eye was 942mb, which is cat 5 pressure and that's after moving inland 34 miles.. I've never seen wind of such insane speed. I know for a fact it blew 140-150mph at my place and I never want to see it again.. im still in a FEMA trailer as State Farm Ins. decided to gip me on my policy.. Sulphur was a complete disaster after Laura. We lost 4 out of every 5 adult hardwoods and pines and this town doesn't even look the same.. Hurricanes change lives, Laura changed mine as I literally lost everything I had, all of it, but im not complaining, I take it in stride!
Where were you when you lost the house? You didn’t get injured? I’m always wanting to know the safest place in the home to shelter in place. Sorry for your loss but glad to hear you’re okay & in good spirits.
I remember this, it took us 22 hours to get to Dallas, I'll never forget how hot it was and so slow. We had to alternate turning our car off to save gas, it was terrible. It still gets brought up every now and then when an evacuation is brought up.
I know this is about Rita but as someone who lived in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina I can tell you without a doubt that probably the most horrific thing I have seen or heard about. I lived in North East Louisiana but the kids that came up from the aftermath... the stories I heard and the things I seen were absolutely horrifying. The sheer destruction and raw devastation caused was truly otherworldly.
Thanks Carly. Hur. Rita was a Louisiana disaster. ✋🏻Lake Charles. Rita was a mess. Saw so many dead alligators in Cameron Parish. I did work In Katrina, and Rita. With Rita, the victims rolled up their sleeves, and began repairing. That was impossible, with Katrina.
I remember Rita. That hurricane season was horrible! I remember the evacuation process was a disaster. I was watching the news when the bus full of seniors caught on fire. Horrifying 😢 The one good thing is that evacuation procedures have gotten so much better.
I didn’t know there was a hurricane until the Wednesday night before Rita made landfall. I was working and living in Beaumont Tx, my mother was most of my family lived in SW Louisiana. I miraculously was able to get to .I-10E and get to Alabama to be with my sister. My mother didn’t want to leave so she decided to stay in SW Louisiana, she said that was the biggest mistake of her life. I trued and tried to get her to come with me but she refused. When I was able to go back to Texas, my apartment had a tree in the living room. The park around the corner from my apartment had ZERO trees left standing. Originally I was going to evacuate to Dallas Tx but some forecast had Dallas having 110 mph winds. Thankfully nobody in my family lost their life. Sone damage was done to property. It was a scary time.
I live in Florida now and I've never lived in Texas but I will never forget Rita because I still feel responsible. I don't know if anybody else did, but I did strongly encourage my friend who lived in Houston in a mobile home to evacuate, with her dogs, in her truck, in the traffic jam, for 9 hours, when it was 90°, and they probably ran out of gas... And in the end they went home and nothing bad happened where they lived. I still feel guilty about this*. Sorry, Linda. *And especially after all the stress of having one friend who was totally clueless scream and yell at me that I was an idiot for not evacuating for Irma. Despite the fact that I live in a non-evac zone, In Florida, where it would take 5 hours just to get out of the state *if there was no traffic trying to evacuate.*
I grew up in Nederland, TX - a small town right next to Beaumont and Port Arthur - and was 10 years old when this evacuation took place. I missed a good chunk of fifth grade due to the evacuation. It was horrible. We were in the car for over 30 hours with two dogs and four people. The heat was sweltering. Standstill traffic more than half the route. No hotel vacancies anywhere. When we came back home after the storm, many buildings had endured moderate to severe wind damage in our area. A tree crushed the shed in our backyard and just barely missed destroying our entire house. Structures on the main road in our town had been demolished by tornadoes. There was nothing but silence, heat, and a seemingly endless power outage for at least a week after that. I don't think I've ever been through another hurricane that was quite as memorable - I didn't live in Texas during Harvey, so I guess I should count myself lucky. The damage to Crystal Beach after Hurricane Ike was pretty much unfathomable, though, and I saw that with my own eyes. Virtually nothing was left standing.
Rode out Rita, evacuated for Laura. Same path, Both night falls. PTSD from the noises that storm created but not being able to see anything. The sound of a generator is triggering.
Rita's evacuation disaster is the reason why you didnt see evacuations during Harvey. It literally traumatized the city. Edit: Rita is also why my mom refused to evacuate for Irma. She saw the track go right up Florida's spine and said, "We are riding this one out."
The evaccuation was tragic, but I'm not sure how it could have been done better given the infrastructure both institutional and physical in tfat part of the country and the United States in general. If it had gone west and hit galveston and no one had evacuated, deaths could have been worse.
I was there in 2005. I was an ER Director at a hospital between New Orleans and Houston Texas. We had just dealt with the huge influx of people from New Orleans traveling across Interstate 10 West to Houston. Many of these people had no resources and were in generational poverty. So they were already desperate. If you recall, that was over 250,000 people. So our resources were already strained. The Mayor of Houston (who later blamed the State and Federal Gov for everything) just saw what happened to the reputation of the Mayor of New Orleans and he wanted to look 'proactive'. He was the main cause of the local hysteria. He played politics and when it backfired, he blamed the other politicians. After Rita, most of us who actually work for a living and don't live off the government came back to destroyed lives yet we quietly rebuilt, not asking the government to bail us out. But that is whole different story.......
I'd like to note: I think part of the reason we were so afraid is because Katrina demonstrated how little the federal government had our collective backs. We saw there was no depending on them.
Thank you for covering this hurricane. I was a teenager during this storm, and it really felt like no one cared. My family and I lived in LA about 1 hour from the gulf, we left only a few hours before it came in the AM. The feeling outside in dead silence before we left was so intense, I knew we weren’t coming back to the same place we would be leaving.
I was in Houston during the time. Our power did go out but we weren't totally destroyed thankfully. The problem I think was we were all thinking, rightfully so at the time, of Katrina and how devastating that storm was. While we in Houston dodged a bullet, the storm was still one not to mess with. Still, I could look back and say 'it could easily have been us" if the storm kept going west another day instead of turning north when it did. That time it was us happened during Hurricane Ike. Far less powerful, but all the more concerning.
I remember looking back as we left our home in Cameron and having this feeling deep down that this time would be different. We had snow during Christmas, the DAY of Christmas. What swamp town in Louisiana on the beach has snow!?!?!?! It was a sign at how bad Rita was going to be ... Worse was after the storm everyone just guessed you left because of Katrina. And when you mentioned Rita they would act like it did no damage. I know Katrina was awful but people trying to play down Rita's destruction was very upsetting and wrong. Also worse because a lot of people didn't talk about Cameron Parrish and Louisiana. The amount of devastation that happened because of that hurricane was unbelievable. I wish I could have documented way more. But I also was only 14 and really heartbroken. The frame of our trailer survive due to it being halfway buried in the mud. Everything around it was like a war zone. It literally felt like someone had dropped a bomb. And the smell of that mud ... That's a smell you don't forget. It's hard describing how I felt in that moment. Having lost everything including your hometown. It's like it wasn't sadness but just a very deep deep emptiness. A dread that would follow me for the rest of my life. People speak about loss But they never really talk about loss from a storm. How to handle it and I would can affect you in so many ways. It's truly devastating.
A lot of people have referred to Hurricane Katrina as the deadly daughter of Hurricane Camille. Well if that's the case; then Hurricanes Rita and Wilma are the sisters of Katrina and the granddaughters of Hurricane Betsy. Interestingly enough; New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had lived through Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969, so he knew all too well the severity and potency of Hurricane Katrina. It's why he issued the Civil Emergency message for the New Orleans metro area to get the residents to understand that Katrina will destroy the city and that they should get the Hell out of New Orleans. This is the text: "Devastating damage expected! Hurricane Katrina; a most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength, rivaling the intensity of Hurricane Camille in 1969. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks; perhaps longer. At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail; leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed. The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rise apartment buildings will be destroyed! Concrete block low rise apartment buildings will sustain major damage; including some wall and roof failure. High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously; a few to the point of total collapse. All windows will be blown out! Airborne debris will be widespread and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles. Sport utility vehicles and light trucks will be moved. The blown debris will create additional destruction. Persons, pets, and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck! Power outages will last for weeks as most power poles will be down and transformers destroyed. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards! The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted. Only the heartiest will remain standing, but will be completely defoliated. Few crops will remain. Livestock exposed to the winds will be killed. An inland hurricane wind warning is issued when either sustained winds close to hurricane force or frequent gusts at or above hurricane force are certain within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset, do not venture outside!"
We live about 40 miles NW of Houston , we all evacuated to my dad's property near Abeline. It was normally a 6 hour drive, took me 13..with 3 large dogs...
Gosh I am so sorry you all had to go through that. It's unreal the amount of people who were leaving too. I think somewhere around 2.5 million was the total estimate
I live in South Louisiana (Terrebonne Parish) and Rita was a shocker. We had just went through Katrina, and where we live, we did not flood for Katrina. But Rita?! Wow did the south Louisiana flood from the storm surge and the winds. It changed flood maps and zoning laws. People on the bayous had to put their homes in the air if they wanted insurance. Property lost value overnight.
When I lived in Florida (Lakeland) in 2006-2009...upon ANY chance of a hurricane making landfall in FL....I would take PTO time, pack up the 5th wheel and I was gone...generally had the roads to myself since I'd leave at sunset/night....I know myself well enough that I know I'd done the same for Katrina and Rita....I don't play that game with catastrophic storms...kind of funny though...I storm chase tornadoes now and don't think twice about it....// 😅
I'll never forget the imagery of the Rita evacuation in the Houston area. Seeing all of those freeways congested, with cars even driving on the shoulders (as at 16:03), was simply surreal. There's a lot that went wrong with the evacuation. I'm not sure if there was a "failure of imagination" on the part of officials when it came to the sheer number of people who evacuated in extreme heat, but it goes to show the role that mass panic can play in evacuation plans. Those 107 deaths could have been avoided. I'll admit, in today's era, I'm concerned about the role social media could play in triggering a mass panic over an emergency situation. This wasn't really something that had to be considered in 2005, as social media was still in its infancy. Obviously Katrina was fresh on the minds of many people, and I see a parallel (albeit on a smaller scale) between the Rita evacuation and the people driving south from Oklahoma City on May 31, 2013 (the day of the El Reno tornado) as a tornadic storm approached the OKC area; the Moore tornado was fresh on the minds of many, and an on-air meteorologist actually suggested people without an underground shelter evacuate. Tornadic storms are quite different from hurricanes; they move a lot more quickly and unpredictably with a lot less lead time, so evacuation isn't recommended for that particular hazard (slow-moving storms like Jarrell 1997 might be the exception).
0:12 I live there! That footage was likely from Hurricane Ivan, a year earlier. It devastated the area and caused the I-10 bridge to collapse. There are still signs of damage around town, all these years later. Love your channel!
We evacuated from NW Houston to Austin - normally a 2 hour drive. With 2 dogs and a cat. Took 13 hours. We decided to do a college tour with my then HS Junior-and she ended up going to University of Texas so there is that. I don't think we will ever evacuate again.
I remember this storm all too well. Working for the telephone company I was in charge of tracking hurricanes and assisting in coordinating switch traffic. We had just lost New Orleans switch and had pulled all traffic to either TX or central LA. Now we had to prepare where that traffic would move and coordinate restoration. In one case rescuing techs from the roof of the site that submerged
It’s pronounced “suh BEAN” just fyi :) Katrina was awful for so many and affected life in more than just NOLA, but Rita brought damage and impacts to my community in central Louisiana.
I live in Houston. So so so many people evacuated who didn't need to. You had people that lived 50-100 miles from the coast evacuating to Dallas. And just some info, it's pronounced Suh-Been Pass.
I think the biggest takeaway for me is the importance of planning ahead and organization. There's a reason the evacuation went smoothly in Louisiana and was an utter shit show in Texas - and that's the level of prior planning and organization that was put into how the evacuations are done, who is told to evacuate, and when they are to evacuate. I'm not saying Louisiana's system is perfect either or that Texas's system hasn't improved since then (although I highly doubt the latter). Organization and planning can always be better. For example, one thing that could have helped move things along would have been at least one "evacuation buses only" lane - this would not only have moved those evacuating by bus faster, it would have encouraged more ppl to leave by bus as well which would result in fewer cars on the roads. Having Amtrak run evacuation routes as well would have also helped speed up evacuation and gotten even more vehicles off the roads. And ofc not having those outside the evacuation zones evacuate unnecessarily would have been the most helpful. But this was directly after Katrina, so I do understand the panic even though the absolute catastrophe in New Orleans literally couldn't be replicated in the Houston area - even with how incredibly prone to flooding Houston is.
Speaking from the field medical personnel standpoint. It’s unrealistic to stage medical personnel on evacuation routes, field medical personnel, and are notoriously understaffed and they’re going to be utilized and evacuation from hospital facilities and nursing home facilities. There will not be enough manpower to stage any kind of medical personnel throughout evacuation routes unless they utilize military staff.
I was living on the border of Texas and Louisiana in a small town called orange. We had so many beautiful large oak trees but rita has changed the entire area and landscape toppling most of our large oak population and we now have nothing but pine trees because of this. I also remember evacuation. It was awful and about the only thing i remember plus once we came back the sense of dread when we pulled into our town and saw little to no trees we thought we werent going to have a home, thankfully only one tree fell on our house and was repaired in the following years. I love that you are doing hurricane videos as that is the number one disaster for SETX and Louisiana. We dont worry about tornadoes but a hurricane? That is were we hang it up. Thanks for the amazing video ❤
I'm just getting around to watching this video.. my family lived in Lumberton, TX just north of Beaumont when this happened. You did a great job of explaining what happened! My parents where friends with the police chief of Lumberton, and when the NHC came out with the new graphic of Rita going straight over SE Texas, we got a phone call at 1am that morning telling us to leave before the traffic got bad.. so we escaped the major bulk of the traffic.. What we came back to was both our house, and my grandfathers house being destroyed by trees.. everything as well as the community was nearly unrecognizable! That being said, Hurricane Katrina's damage over shadowed Rita's by a long shot.. I remember sitting in front of a TV watching the weather channel, and a reporter was less than a mile from our house, and he said, "things here are not bad at all" while multiple trees were falling in the background! Shortly after getting back, and cleaning up for almost a week, we got word that the schools wouldn't open up for the next 3 weeks, and the fact that we were actually homeless, my parents made the decision to relocate us to east Tennessee where our cousins took us under their wing, and helped us start a new life up there! The amount of emotions as a 12 year old at the time was very numb.. but sitting here as an adult today watching this video, I wanted to actually cry because I thought about everything that happened to us, and how we were treated as refugees of Rita.. The realization of the fact we were truly "the forgotten ones" happened less than a week after the storm because Katrina overshadowed Rita.. I can go into more context, especially with the Katrina refugees coming into our community, but it would be more long winded than this.. Thank you for a great video! My emotions were high during this because it brought back a lot of memories..
Us here in North Carolina were mostly spared the wrath of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season; we really felt for those folks on the Gulf Coast. Up here, Hurricane Ophelia’s eyewall moved over the Crystal Coast region of Carteret County as a Category 1 storm. And now we’re getting a visit from another Ophelia here in 2023. We’ve had two Arthurs, too: a tropical storm in 1996 and a Category 2 hurricane that made landfall in 2014, also along the Crystal Coast. Having a repeated name obviously means it avoided retirement, so we’ve gotten off relatively easy compared to some. Hopefully this Ophelia blows on by quickly and lets us off easy. Those “F” storms tend to have it out for us; Fran in ‘96, Floyd in ‘99, and Florence in ‘18. All retired. If we’re in the cone of an F storm, even slightly, even five days out, I get major storm anxiety. The “I” storms bother everyone; we’ve had Isabel in ‘03, Irene in ‘11, and Isaias in 2020. Isaias dropped a fatal tornado in Bertie County that was rated an EF3; the last time an F3/EF3 tornado was produced by a hurricane: Hurricane Rita, fifteen years earlier. Just to bring my trivial post back full-circle.
My experience of Hurricane Rita involved my occupation as an Officer in the U.S. Merchant Marine. I was called to duty from my leave in N.W. Florida, flying into Houston, TX. I came aboard the Motor Vessel Cape Texas a 635 ft. Roll on- Roll off ship owned by U.S. Navy under the Maritime Administration. Our humanitarian mission was to operate the ship as a refuge for any people around Beaumont, Texas who had been driven from their homes. This was a FIRST for me as my normal duties Involve hauling heavy equipment and weapons to war zones. So for me as for most of our crew, this "Mission" was VERY DIFFERENT from ANYTHING we had ever done before. As the storm approached, our ship remained alongside the pier in Beaumont with our loading ramp down. We allowed anyone requesting aid to come aboard. Most folks drove their POVs (Privately Owned Vehicles) aboard. They came in family groups and we gave them army cots, blankets and food. They were allowed to stay on the spacious lower cargo decks. We accommodated everyone as best we could and had NO complaints that I heard of. I was assigned as a 2nd Officer (Navigation) as well as Medical PIC (Person In Charge) as all US Navy MSC/MARAD ships of this class have a small 7 bed hospital aboard as well as up to date medicines and equipment. These ships do go into Harms Way, if required, so they must be READY. Taking care of a civilian group should not have been a problem and it was not. Everyone, aboard, crew and "Refugees" worked and behaved well. This mission lasted 72 hours plus or minus. I had come aboard thinking we were being called up to assist in the operation Iraqi Freedom and expected to be going overseas for at LEAST 6 months. We were prepared for ANYTHING, however, as usual, so taking care of our own citizens was ki d of NICE, for me, and a welcome change from the middle eastern deployments I was used to. It was a letdown when I found out, for SURE, we were NOT going to have a regular deployment. I was hoping to stay longer, as I had packed my gear to last for 6 months away.from civilization. Hurricane Rita was a BIG LETDOWN as well. The winds seldom exceeded 45 knots and the storm tides we had expected only rose 6 feet at most. It did not even rain much. I am used to Hurricanes and Typhoons and Rita, AT LEAST WHERE I WAS, was practically NOTHING. "A TEMPEST IN A TEACUP" as people used to say. I watched this video and was very surprised at the damages a d the deaths reported. For MY SHIP, We had NO INJURIES, SICKNESS OR DEATHS, THANK GOD! .It was the FIRST TI.E I ever heard of our ships being g used in a Humanitarian Mission, though I believe we did more later, in Hawaii. I wish to note that the US Navy also operates our Hospital Ships, ie the USNS Comfort, USNS Hope and USNS Mercy (Used during Covid in NY and on the West Coast) and that THOSE ships do humanitarian work.as their MAIN MISSION. All Ameri ans should remember that all of our ships are manned by the United States Merchant Marine. We have Ranks, we get medals but we are.considered by the Military to be CIVILIANS! They always CHANGE THEIR OPINION OF US when we go to WAR with them. Anywhere, Anytime, Any Way! I wish to apologize for this LONG LETTER. I hope it was informative to everyone. Have a BLESSED DAY!
I was watching the Weather Channel pretty regularly....almost obsessively, from about a few days out from landfall of Katrina on to the end of the season. Living in the middle of tornado alley, (Kansas)....I kept thinking My God! How much more are those poor people going to have to deal with? Tornadoes are nothing to sneeze at, but over and done with relatively quickly. A hurricane just grinds on and on and on....... I do remember that some displaced people/families did relocate up here....a bunch went to Wichita. If I remember correctly, some had family this way, so had familiar faces to greet them. Churches and charitable orgs stepped up and helped out with placement etc for a lot of them. I sincerely hope and pray that 2005 was just a one off, and there's not a repeat....but nature, being what it is, has the final say.
It’s still pretty amazing, 98 tornadoes & 1 death. All the damage from Rita landfall & 1 person drowns. Compared to 100+ ppl dying from traffic. I’m always amazed the storm itself doesn’t result in more deaths considering the damage done to the structures.
A whole lot of people were not aware that backroads would have saved them tremendous grief. It's how I evacuated from Hurricane Laura in 2020. Even though it was projected to hit Beaumont, TX, the hurricane moved east and destroyed Lake Charles, Louisiana. Looking back on the evacuation of Hurricane Laura, it was the right call to leave before mandatory evacuations were put in place. Even then, I would have taken backroads during an evacuation. Just would have made logical sense. Had television stations shown people roads to take to avoid traffic congestion, people would not have died in the heat wave before the hurricane hit. If not so much in Houston, at least in Beaumont, more people would have gotten to their destination taking the every conceivable backroad. The maps of Texas and the county maps would have helped save hours worth of traffic congestion. I was southwest of Houston during Rita and stayed in that area.
That's how my husband and I got from SW Houston to just north of Huntsville in less than 6 hours during the evacuation. We had made plans to go stay with family up by Huntsville, but had to wait until the afternoon of the big evacuation to leave because we had to work until noon. A group of other family members left the evening before us and only took the freeways. We arrived at the place where we were all staying at a half hour before them. They ended up being on the road for 20 hours straight without exiting the freeway. I had some really good Texas road atlases and a set of key map books of Harris County and the surrounding counties. We took residential neighborhood roads until we got out of the city and then stuck mostly to county roads until we got close to Huntsville. We cut through the Sam Houston forest on unmarked forestry service roads during the last step of the way to minimize time on the two lane highways near Huntsville because even they were gridlocked. At one point, when we had no choice but to get out on a little farm to market highway that was backed up solid for a couple of miles, a few cars turned off and followed us through the backroads. I guess they saw me holding up my road atlas and figured we knew where we were going. It was an adventure but not a fun adventure. I've always enjoyed taking daytrips and using my maps/atlases to explore the back roads, and that skill really came in handy. Because this was well before map apps on phones, and I don't remember many people having GPS devices.
I do wonder if Rita's evacuation informed the shelter-in-place attitude for Harvey. I was watching the Yellowknife evacuation this summer as I knew someone who was going through it and they made sure that there were all the things in the recommendations were implemented before they started the evacuation. Granted, it was a 1500 km evacuation through isolated areas so it seems obvious to create waystations along the way but wonder if Rita's evac failure created a larger wave than just in Texas. Thanks for the video!
I worked at one of the colleges in Houston during this time and this was the first hurricane I’d ever experienced. Five days before landfall there were several students who told me they weren’t coming to class that week and were evacuating to Dallas. Given the misery and horrors of Katrina I immediately excused them for the week. I went home from work that day and packed my things so my ex and I could leave Houston immediately. The next morning, my ex thought it was more important to go to their job than to leave Houston; their job was quite secure, they made good money, and their boss would have been more than understanding given the circumstances. I tried to use logic and reason considering they were a scientifically-minded individual stating that the traffic was going to be an utter shit show the longer we stayed put. We left the day after and, sorry to say, I was right about the traffic heading east on I-10. As the fates would have it though, a relative of mine in Crosby called us while we were en route to Shreveport, LA to check in. I told them that we were on I-10 headed east to Louisiana and were near Winnie (it took 3-4 hours to make it that far). He told us to turn around and stay with him because the dirty side of the storm was going to hit the eastern portion of the Texas coast. My ex and I then made the decision to turn around and head back to Houston given this new information. I remember calling my folks back East to update them on our plans. My mother became hysterical fearing for my life; my dad had to rip the phone out of my mother’s hand and calmly said that he’d handle her and that he trusted our decision-making process knowing that we had accurate information at hand. We headed back to Houston. It was soooo quiet; peacefully so! We watched the cloud bands of the storm gracefully arcing across the sky. We lived close to downtown and traffic was completely non-existent; an impossible condition for the city in typical weather. The winds began to pick up a little and some kids fashioned some sails out of bed sheets and sticks while riding their bikes and skateboards. All the stores were closed. The two of us had dinner, watched a few movies, filled up the bathtubs and then went to bed. We slept through the storm. The next day we woke up and were pleasantly surprised that we still had power and the only thing that fell over was a lawn chair. We went up to the northern part of the city to see how things were going; they had lost power but a neighborhood restaurant was open to feed anyone who showed up. We sat down with folks there and had a lovely lunch; everyone counted their blessings!
I was a kid when this happened and we lived southwest of houston. The plan was to evacuate to my aunt's house in Houston which was on high elevation. We spent like 3 hours on the road before my dad decides we shouls just go back home. We were home in 20 minutes
I live in far southeast Houston near I-45 the Gulf Freeway, a major evacuation route for Galveston and other bay area communities. On Thursday morning my husband and I walked to the freeway and saw the gridlock, nobody moving, a sea of cars. On Friday night the wind was picking-up and we walked to the freeway again... eerily empty, like we were the only people in the world. I think one of the problems with the evacuation was that people tried to take too much with them. There were automobiles, trucks, trailers, RV's, boats, all clogging the roads. If a family had three cars then they took all three cars instead of everybody getting into one. Some families had five or seven vehicles on the road.
It was a nightmare i will NEVER do again. We tried to do the right thing. We waited until our evacuation zone was scheduled to leave and by then it was too late. We should have said "F it" and left when WE wanted to leave but no, we tried to do what we were told to do because we THOUGHT the Emergency Manager knew what he was talking about. God what a logistics nightmare. I will never evacuate like that again. We live in a really old wooden house and I'll find a nice brick built hotel here in Houston and take my chances but i promise you i will NEVER evacuate like that again. Many people that i know who were caught in that clusterfuck will never do it again either. I'll take my chances with the hurricane and if it's my time then it's my time but i will not put myself in that situation ever again. 18 hours to get to my sister's house in Sulphur Springs. 18 hours! It's a 5 hour drive, tops, from Houston. You have no idea what 18 hours at basically a snails pace with a three year old was like. Seriously, i'm getting flashbacks just typing this comment 😂
Oh my gosh, my hubby and I were living in Kemah,TX. It was 2 weeks post Katrina and people were scared. It was HOT🥵 & we were stuck on the highway 6 hours. We ended having to go back home as it was nearly impossible to leave. Thank goodness Rita didn’t do much harm, but I’ll NEVER forget it.
I live in calcasieu g remember that evacuation ridiculously vividly for someone in middle school at the time. We went east to Mississippi. What was normally around a 6-8 hour drive to my uncle's house took us 12 hours g we were lucky. The rest of my family going to the same spot took around 21 hours going highway/interstate. My dad has a penchant for the senic route is the only reason we weren't trapped. Also the spinoff tornadoes in the Mississippi valley were the first tornadoes I'd ever seen outside of "Twister." I knew what they were, but i was absolutely entranced by the several dancing clouds swirling around me. I nearly gave my mom a stroke because I couldn't move to get inside. She literally drug me into the room by the back of my shirt. Just as a disclaimer: I don't recommend this for anyone, i was a stupid 13 year old who had never seen dancing wind before.
Having lived this I can say it's exactly the craziness that came from Katrina that brought on Rita. We spend 14 hours getting to Dallas and got lucky enough to find fuel in random places on our way there.
I had just woken up from a nightmare about flooding in the Gulf area and wanted to show a friend your channel - wild that this is your latest video! Rita is still lurking in my brain after all these years. My family was okay, but we didn't know how they were doing for what felt like a very long time. Grandpa was furious about how poorly managed the evacuation was for the rest of his life, and every family get-together after then included long talks about weather safety. Thank you for covering this.
Hi Carly, i think you might find the story of "cyclone tracy" interesting. This cyclone devastated the Australian city of Darwin 3am Christmas morning 1974. Very interesting story from a weather and human perspective. 80% of buildings destroyed, 40k ppl evacuated with huge amount of these people were severely traumatized and never returned, many never celebrated Christmas ever again. Wind speed measuring equipment failed at 217kmph with estimates of highest speed ranging from 240-280kmph. My comment doesn't do it justice, its up your alley i assure.
Unfortunately because Houston has no mass transit, and Texas has no regional mass transit, an evacuation of the entire Houston metro would be impossible with the type of notice a hurricane gives. Our current mayor or governor isn’t going to support anything that doesn’t involve oil, unfortunately this isn’t going to change in the near future.
I'm curious, what kind of strategy could be recommended or suggested even that would "prevent gridlock traffic"? I mean, HOW would that be done. As someone who's been in those chaotic situations, spontaneous disaster so to speak, I don't have a clue how that could have been avoided. Ideas? By the way, well done video. I watched it in it's entirety and subscribed to the channel.
The evaluation was terrible. My family n I live in houston tx. It took us over 3 hours to get to Katy, tx, when it's supposed to be a 25-minute drive. After 5 hours, my dad made a u turn back home.
Making the decision to give evacuation orders is never a simple one. If you plan to evacuate 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people, you can't really control it all. Some people are going to be harmed or die during the evacuation. Some people who should evacuate won't, and some that shouldn't will. You can't stop people from doing what they are doing (well aside from using military force, I suppose), so the best you can do is harm mitigation. If a large number of people are leaving an area for whatever reason, traffic is going to be gridlocked, that can't be prevented. Offering people supplies and medical care is the best you can do. But trying to save literally everyone is unrealistic, if for no other reason than that if you have a million people, during any one week some of them are going to die, disaster or not. Just like triage in a mass casualty situation, disaster management on a large scale doesn't focus on saving everyone, because you can't.
How do you prevent people from evacuating that didn't need to? It is easy to arm chair quarterback response plans. Having been a part of disaster response, I can tell you that people are never predictable and all you can do is plan. But the best laid plans will fall apart and often due. How do you stop gridlock when an entire south coast is fleeing? Unfortunately people wait until the last minute (can you blame them? I don't want my home looted either).
A situation that definitely paid to know backroads. That's what common sense would mean to me if i had a hurricane behind me and gridlock traffic on the highways ahead of me.
I still remember like it was yesterday, the lines where so long in the gas station and everybody was looking for water due to how hot it was and the worst part was that our car didn’t had a/c 🥴 we where going up north from Houston Tx
The panic behind Rita was so justified. You just had Katrina which at the time was the 2nd strongest hurricane ever in the Gulf at 175mph and 902mb( just slightly behind Camille at 175mp and 900mb) and it just devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. Now they were faced with a even more powerful Hurricane than Katrina and the new strongest hurricane ever in the gulf at 180mph and 895mb. Everyone in the projected path had a very real a justified panic.
We Houstonians demonstrated the unfeasibility of mass, rapid evacuation of a large city.
@@grmpEqweerHow yall holding up after Beryl
@@Sportsandstuff851it was miserable no power for 8 days and for some people even longer. Some people still don’t have power. Pretty bad damage but not as much flooding as Harvey. Harvey was mostly a rain dump, Beryl was lots of wind
Hurricane Harvey was lots WORSE then Hurricane Katrina.
In my mind it felt like Rita happened a week after Katrina. I guess since we were still in so much grief it happened that way.
I flew into Houston TX days before Rita for the company I was working for to help prepare, ride out the storm in the basement of our plant and start the plant back up. It was very weird walking into the airport as everybody was trying to get out. People were pointing as us like we were crazy. It pushed East of the Houston area and we rode out the storm watching baseball on TV and drinking beer.
I had it will be extremely creepy/surreal..
On your way person they had to go in after Hurricane Katrina and they said it was just awful because you would think is in the obvious but it’s raw sewage everywhere, no power no, nothing where everyone was staying to get power back up, etc.
But yeah, Whatever you did out there to help, I send my respect and gratitude. You have a great one!
My evacuation attempt to Dallas failed to the point that by the time I made it to Livingston just north of Houston, I ended up heading east of there to Warren which is in the region that it hit. Wish I had stayed home because I went through all of that madness just to go into it!!
Rita snapped 10 giant pine trees around our house. An oak actually hit the house but none of the large pines did. A large pine lime drove into the ground and severed our water line.
I flew in with the red cross to San Antonio during Rita. It was an empty plane other than a couple dozen red cross workers. Super creepy.
That is horrific. I had no idea so many people died during the evacuation process. Thank you for covering this.
I was following the storm and I didn't hear about it back then. That's crazy so many people died trying to get away
The risks have to be mitigated with these storms. Pretty much in order to get out safely. One would have to make a decision based on a very early model of the storm. The cost of staying in a hotel for what could end up being a month would be astronomical only to come back to find out either 1) house is completely gone 2) house has massive damage and what wasn’t damage was looted 3) House did not suffer any damage, but yet was looted 4) House did not experience any damage
The area in Hampton Roads I have heard can take 3 to 4 days to evacuate safely😮😮😮
Same thing happened with hurricane Katrina so many died trying to evacuate
@@GR-bn3xjAs did I. And I didn't know how bad that tragedy was until Hurricane Ike struck the area in 2008 as a high-end Category 2
It was hushed up as much as possible to cover for the politicians.
I remember one of the big arguments for not evacuating for Harvey, was what happened for Rita. I don't know how true that is, but that's what my Houston family thought was the reasoning. By that point, I was already watching a lot of online weather news, and new Harvey was going to be bad because of the stall, and tried to warn my family. They decided to still ride it out. Many of them have PTSD to this day because of what they went through with Harvey. Honestly, I don't know if there is really a wrong or right answer for what to do in the path of these storms. It feels like for officials, your damned if you do and your damned if you don't.
True and with harvey was just major flooding
Haven't forgot about the Tax Day flood, either.
We are human and dont have all the answers
More so Ike after Rita was a big reason people stayed, it was definitely a big reason people decided to just ride the storm
I won't evacuate again. Honestly, Harvey was a different kind of storm compared to Rita as far as path of impact and prevailing weather systems that impacted it and whatnot. You simply can't compare hurricanes. All I know is I will never evacuate like that again. I might evacuate to a more stable structure like a big brick hotel or something but I will not be attempting to evacuate to another city.
I grew up in Palestine, Tx. about 2 and a half hours north of Houston. I remember so vividly when this happened, a lot of evacuees detoured off the interstates (I assume because of the awful traffic jams) and found their way coming through our town, on the way I guess towards Dallas. Every store in our town got wiped nearly clean, and the traffic was so insane that what was normally a 15 or 20 minute drive to get from my school to my grandmother's house, in the center of town, took about 2 hours. I remember in that traffic jam seeing someone get out of their car, jump up and snatch some fruit off the branch somebody's tree that was hanging over the fence near the road, which to an elementary age kid just seemed like the biggest symbol of anarchy and chaos imaginable lol. Just a surreal experience as a kid. I had no idea the tradgedy that was unfolding on the highways outside of Houston. May all those people rest in peace
HAHA better some fruit off a tree than breaking into someone's house! Bless. They must have been really hungry.
I remember this all too well. My ex-wife and I were part of this evacuation disaster. We lived in League City, and they were predicting that our area was going to get hit very hard. We prepped our apartment the best we could. After being stuck on the interstate for 12 hours barely moving, we managed to turn around and made it back to a ghost town. We caught the edge of Rita and lost power for about a day. Just a month before my ex had lost her Mom in Alabama. 2005 was not a good year for us. Oddly enough, we moved from the area exactly one week before Hurricane Ike hit the region in 2008.
Took me almost 30 hours to get to my family's house in Austin tx from Galveston. It was horrible and one reason I'm always hesitant to evacuate. During the evacuation I only ate once during that 30 hours and had limited water. When I arrived at my parents house, at nearly midnight I had a full meal waiting for me. Luckily Rita hooked a slight right and I had no damage and very little rain upon returning home.
Took me 11 hours to get from Mission Bend to Splendora, then an additional 3 hours or so to get to Livingston. Was trying to get to the Dallas area, and by the time we got to Livingston we had enough and instead decided to head east to Warren, a small town north of Silsbee and Lumberton not far from the LA border. The hurricane went right through this area while Houston was untouched!! I wish I had stayed home because it gave me nightmares for at least a year or so. Fast forward to 2008, when Ike is heading our way and I am HOTLY against evacuating! Needless to say, I stayed home and of course survived or wouldn't be here to make this comment right now.
What I remember about this hurricane most is that bus caring elderly evacuees catching on fire and twenty-four of them dying.
Yes, I originally had that in and what a horrible loss that was. I read somewhere that it ended up being a multimillion dollar lawsuit. The entire event was just awful
Oh wow, I had forgotten about that...and that storm surge was a nightmare
That was a very sad story
Oh my goodness, it was so sad. The traffic was backed up so bad, it was difficult for rescue to get to them. It was horrific.
does anyone know exactly what caused the bus to start burning? Cause i genuinely want to know and am gonna google it right afterwards
Just googled it and it seems to be bc “insufficent lubrication of a rear axle” Now that u cant escape from and obv a lawsuit came out of it. A lack of care taken from a person lead to the death of 24.
Friend of mine evacuated with two large horse trailers full of horses. I think she had 10-12 horses plus quite a few dogs. They were stuck on the highway in the heat for over 24 hours,ran out of water for the horses, almost ran out of fuel. Aluminum horse trailers are like ovens when not moving, even with maximum windows open. All the horses were in pretty bad shape when she reached her destination in Lawton,OK, just across the border from TX. I was watching on TV as I had moved from Lawton a month previously and I was talking to her on the phone every few hours, feeling totally helpless.
I'm tearing up reading this because I know what it's like to be far from someone you care about and unable to help them aside from just being a listening ear. I'm sure, though, that you were a blessing to her. ❤
I lived in an apartment downtown Galveston in 2005. We evacuated early because of the horrifying things we saw on the news after Katrina, 18 hours to get to Dallas. The worst part though came after the storm. We weren't allowed back on the island for a few days and when we finally got in to try and go home we were confronted by armed guards. Black uniforms with no markings and sub-machineguns. The fear of looting and rioting was so great in Galveston that someone hired PMC dudes to patrol. They kept coming to check and make sure we were supposed to be there but refused to identify themselves or admit whether or not they were law enforcement officers, though they seemed to be detaining people they thought might be looters. Guess which people those were. Galveston has always had problems with racism but that was above and beyond.
That's truly pathetic that humans act like that. Those are the true scum. Taking advantage of people or anything is cowardly and pitiful. No true man would harm anything. Protecting is what REAL men do.
@@chesterfieldthe3rd929no true man would loot.
@@theskyizblue2day431 100% agreed friend
It may be bad, But It's also sad that they had to be hired. There's a reason they were hired and why people are scared of looters after a storm.
The truth hurts sometimes but it’s the truth, one group does overwhelmingly turn to looting in these situations. It’s almost always exclusively the same group no matter what. You might not like it but you better understand that it’s just a sad reality and if you choose to ignore it then it might cost you your life. Stereotypes exist for a reason, it’s because there’s always some truth in what’s being said.
I live in south texas and was 19 when this happened. It is 100% why no one wants to leave. They either get out several days from landfall or just ride it out for better or worse. It was awful seeing it on the news. Now after harvey, you might see it swing the other direction. So many people were trapped when they released the dam water, they might start evacuating again.
I did wonder if what happened during Rita affected why so many stayed for Harvey. Thanks for confirming.
@@MKPiatkowski
Yup. I won't evacuate again.
Hurricane Harvey and Rita have about the same number of fatalities. You are dammed if you evacuate or not. Houston was built on a swamp
Exactly! I feel as though danger was suppressed with no calls for evacuation due to Rita.
@@MKPiatkowskithere wasn't an urgent push to evacuate!
I could literally watch your videos all day, such a great job at covering the entire story of every situation.
2005 was the year of the man-made disasters that just so happened to involve hurricanes. The deaths because of the evacuation was man made, the failures of the levees were man made, and the disastrous response after Katrina was man made.
" . . . the disastrous response after Katrina was man made."
Please tell me what we did wrong. I was one of the first 'boots on the ground' at Naval Air Station New Orleans' after Hurricane Katrina. I was the Operations NCO for the Forward TOC (Tactical Operations Center) managing the logistics for Operation Katrina Relief. When we landed the decision had been made that we were going to 'accept risk' and land the airplane on a runway that was littered with hurricane debris, had no lighting and we had no communications with the ground. We literally put our lives on the line in order to get started a few hours faster.
I spent the next three weeks in a state of sleep deprivation.
Before we could begin distributing relief supplies, we needed to know what relief supplies were needed where. We needed to know what roads we could use to get there.
But this is getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we had to do was unload the airplane. Which we literally did by hand because there was no cargo handling equipment. At tine time we got the first set of bad news that screwed up our plan. All of the fuel supplies on base had been contaminated with rainwater and were unusable. This not only meant that we were going to have to fly in fuel - but the cargo aircraft had to reduce the amount of cargo they carried because they had to carry enough fuel to get back home without refueling. And - this was a fighter base and it had no cargo handling equipment. So the first things we had to do was fly in the equipment needed to unload cargo from airplanes. Then we had to fly in enormous fuel bladders and fly in fuel to put in them. Then we had to fly in construction vehicles to dig out an area for the safe storage of that fuel.
Then we had to fly in a quartermaster unit to move the supplies from the airstrip to a supply depot they set up. They then began sorting and organizing the supplies. Then we had to fly in a light Cavalry troop and send them out to map roads and determine which ones were usable and which ones weren't. Then we had to fly in even more fuel and transportation units to move the supplies. At the same time the cavalry units began making contact with any local authorities they could find and sending lists of what supplies were needed at what locations.
Only then could we begin loading trucks and dispatching convoys.
We knew certain specific things:
How much cargo a particular type of military cargo plane could carry.
How many of those planes we could park and unload at the same time.
How long it took to unload an airplane and have the ramp space clear for the next airplane.
Knowing all of this we could do the math and know what the maximum amount of relief supplies we could process and send forward.
It was less than 40% of what was needed.
You're criticizing us for failing to do the impossible.
@@colincampbell767 you aren’t the one I was criticizing. The failure to maintain the levees, the federal, city, and state leaders bickering made this worse.
@@colincampbell767 Your government failed you. Stop taking it so personally; nobody doubts that the boots did all that they could.
@colincampbell767 I just gotta say, my hats off to you, sir. You guys don’t get enough recognition and you SHOULD! I could not even imagine! My husbands a full time FF/medic and people just have ZERO idea what you guys go through. Putting your own lives at risk to save others and people sure have something to say but I GUARANTEE you, they wouldn’t last a second doing the work you that you do. They have zero, absolutely zero room to talk or even give their opinion until they’re ready to strap up and go fight the crap you guys fight. Their minds couldn’t even go there let alone do it. I commend you and you need to hear that more.. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what it would be like to be in that situation. I would be terrified. Just know there is us folks out here (and a lot of us!) that appreciate you and know that there isn’t many people that would go the great lengths that you have, to do the job that you do. I commend you!!
Something definitely changed with the weather. I was born and raised in southeast Texas and never had to evacuate for a hurricane until Rita. As a 17yr old who had to drive ahead seperate from the rest of the family with my elderly grandmother but still got caught in traffic, it was traumatic. I get nerved up in standstill traffic to this day.
I wanna add something.
They did use a panic tactic, I remember them saying if you stay, notify your next of kin.
The evacuation killed more than the storm did.
Go figure.
I was living in Sulphur, Louisiana when Rira hit and I also remember the authorities telling people to use a permanent marker and write their name, social security number and next of kin on their inner forearm
I remember that, too. Rough year for hurricanes! There was a lot of 'impending doom' going around.
@brianguidry5246 I remember hearing about that.
I think...it's been so long...they had people in Bolivar do that for IKE.
@windwatcher11 true.
It also made people leery of leaving when Ike came ashore.
Even with the contra flow lanes.
@@therogueveteran Yes, they did tell Bolivar that. i will never forget seeing the yellow house that was the only thing left in the wake of Ike, like the storm said "nope, not that one." And so many people didn't heed that warning and they found bodies in the bay.
"I think they could have taken action to prevent the gridlock from happening, but that's just me." Then immediately takes a sip of her drink.
I don't know if it was intentional, but it was perfect.
It happened because everyone thought the storm was going to hit new Orleans again... but the storm went further west
Story time. I’ve always been fascinated by tornadoes. But I realized my mom always watched hurricanes. When I got older I realized she had to send power crews out to these places impacted. I never cared about hurricanes until then. Now I have full respect for all weather. Thank you for this video
It was the 2004 season that had me paying attention to hurricanes, being my mom was living in the Tampa Bay region at the time. I had just flew out to Kansas in May that year and Hurricane Charley was a very close call. Came ashore in Punta Gorda as a 150-mph Category 4.
A cold front had moved down from the north and caused the hurricane to make the sudden right-hand turn just a few hours before landfall. Had that cold front been 50 miles farther north, the outcome would have been far worse for Tampa, especially given the RI ahead of landfall (Jumped from a 110 mph Cat 2 to a 150 mph Cat 4 within three hours).
@@norman6492 Katrina got my attention. I was trying to fly from Wisconsin to California to visit my mom and that harpy Katrina told me no. Planes were grounded but I got out the next day. When I came home I heard about all the fallout and am still learning things to this day. It seems odd that I never gave much thought to tropical storms and hurricanes since Mom's from Florida, but it makes sense when you consider I grew up in SoCal. We had quakes to be afraid of. Now I live in tornado country. Any way you look at it, nature is always trying to kill us.
4:33: One thing that is startling is that in the short time from the formation ( August 23) and later landfall( August 29th) of Katrina to the formation and naming of Rita ( September 18th), there were five other new named storms in that 26 day period. K to R in the alphabet is pretty large gap. It turned out that was the busiest hurricane season in history until 2020 with 26 named storms.
That never even occurred to me. Insane how active that season was
28 named storms. First time NWS had to use the Greek alphabet to name storms. The last named storm of the 2005 season was actually in January of 2006. The "season" ends November 30. Source: www.weather.gov/tae/climate_2005review_hurricanes PS Also, I was there. In southeast Florida.
That’s a hurricane for every letter of the english alphabet, that’s just terrifying
We ran through the English alphabet and had to use 6 letters of the Greek alphabet - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta. Also, though the season runs from June 1 through November 30, the last named storm of the 2005 Hurricane Season was in January of 2006. There were actually 28 named storms in 2005. www.weather.gov/tae/climate_2005review_hurricanes
My dad had to go down to New Orleans and SW Louisiana to cover the devastation that Katrina and Rita brought. He wrote for a state newspaper at the time. This video does a great job at showing how destructive this season was here and in Texas, and one of the best videos I've seen on Hurricane Rita itself, a storm which really needs more attention like this. Thank you so much for making this video, it's a wonderful one, and I wish you a happy birthday today Carly.
My parents lived just west of Galveston. They evacuated to Wichita Falls, which normally takes 5-6 hours. It took 18! They weren’t mad, because my mom went through Camille in MS.
I think it was a sort named Dora or something but in like 1964 a major hurricane hit Galveston which also caused a ef4 tornado
@@samuelraytheweirdcontentgu8551Hilda was the one, and yes it did drop an F4, one of only 2 ever spawned by a hurricane (other was Carla in 1961)
Omg Camille was horrific
Texas will NEVER address the horrible city planning that leads to all the traffic and gridlock. The government there just adds more lanes and refuses to invest in public transportation. I grew up around NYC, I'm used to traffic. But Texas traffic is an entirely different beast. I lived there for almost a decade and the congestion in non-emergency situations is unreal. From the big cities to the small--city planning when it comes to roads is abysmal.
I was 13 at the time and lived in central Houston. My school stayed open for longer than it should have and a couple of my teachers made threats that if we evacuated early and didn't show up to class, we'd get F's on any assignments they would have given for those days. By the time our school actually shut down, traffic had started becoming backed up. I remember my mom and some of our neighbors trying to decide if we should attempt to evacuate or stay home and ride it out. In the end, we decided it was too late to evacuate and so we stayed home and prayed we'd be ok. My mom and I were scared because we had lost everything in Tropical Storm Allison 6 years prior and so we were expecting the worst. We were thankful when Rita missed us in the end. Afterwards, I heard horror stories from a lot of my classmates about how it took them 20+ hours to get out of Houston.
Rita was an important lesson in evacuations though. I see a lot of people online calling people stupid if they don't immediately evacuate for a storm, and every time I tell them about Rita and why evacuations are now done the way they are.
I remember Allison. Went to work that day and the forecast was rain. By mid-morning break it was a tropical storm. It wouldn't have been as bad if it hadn't decided to back up over us again. Had a co-worker who would have been stuck in the water on the freeways if he hadn't modified his jeep for high water.
Who the hell holds grades over lives!? My parents would have raised hell over us being told that!
@@shadiankeeper My mom too, and me if I had kids.
So happy to see an upload from you. Your videos are so well put together and I always appreciate the humanity you bring to tragedy. ♥️
Thanks for this great video. I grew up in Houston TX and Sulphur LA, but now live in the Northeast. I remember watching all of this on TV as it unfolded, and still remember the feeling of horror right after Katrina. I’m sympathetic to the overreaction that led to mass evacuations.
But I also remember hurricane scares growing up, and never truly trust a weather forecast more than 24 hours in advance. Too many storms weakened or turned at the last minute, and we sat in our boarded up house eating up all of our ice cream for nothing. It was exciting as a kid.
But as a mom responsible for the safety of 4 kids now, I’m not sure what I would have done. We have family in TX far from the coast. I suspect I would have overreacted and evacuated with everyone else.
Love the hurricane coverage! Tornados get a lot of love because they're so concentrated in area and dramatic, while hurricanes are so big and broad and spread out... But they still really effect people and communities, something Rita clearly showed in so many ways.
Look up wink's coverage of Ian. They did an exemplary job for the people of South West Florida. They're lucky to have such a good weather and news team. It's a lot to watch but worth it. I especially lived how caring they were to the people in the path of that storm. It is on RUclips.
You get more warning with a hurricane. I’ve been thru 1 Cat 1 hurricane and missed on 2 stronger ones when they turned and went away from where my family lived at those times. Dad was in the navy so we moved a lot. Hurricanes were part of our lives until we moved back to northern Illinois and now had to worry about those pesky tornadoes.
I’ve been through both and the main difference is anxiety for a few minutes Vs anxiety for days. In that sense hurricanes take more of a toll on you. I describe the last hurricane I went through as going through a tornado every 5 minutes. That’s how strong the wind gusts were that it literally sounded like a tornado was hitting my house every 5 minutes. And this lasted from 5am to 2pm.
As a Vermilion Parish resident, I appreciate you covering this storm and making our story be heard. The storm surge that pushed through Pecan Island hit my grandparents’ home in Forked Island. Since then, the home is now up on 13 ft cinder blocks and I currently live in it. Thank you for covering this!!! ❤️❤️
Same happened here in Terrebonne parish. Some of the worse flooding just from Rita riding our coast. Was a shocker
Kaplan... i know a fella that ran from the storm surge
It’s ALWAYS a great day when a new Carly video is out!
Awesome content as always!!
Tool a direct hit from Rita's eyewall here in Sulphur, La. My fiance and I evacuated to Arkansas and fortunately at that time returned home to a massive mess of trees but none hit the house. Fast forward to Aug 26 2020 at 1:00am when Hurricane Laura's eyewall ended direct center atop of my home with me in it. I lost every single tree I had along with the house. Seven 90ft plus tall adult pine trees fell through the roof down to the brick.. Rita was definitely bad but it doesn't even compare to the power, wind speed, and structural damage to which Laura caused.
The pressue during the passing of the dead center of Laura's eye was 942mb, which is cat 5 pressure and that's after moving inland 34 miles.. I've never seen wind of such insane speed. I know for a fact it blew 140-150mph at my place and I never want to see it again.. im still in a FEMA trailer as State Farm Ins. decided to gip me on my policy.. Sulphur was a complete disaster after Laura. We lost 4 out of every 5 adult hardwoods and pines and this town doesn't even look the same.. Hurricanes change lives, Laura changed mine as I literally lost everything I had, all of it, but im not complaining, I take it in stride!
Where were you when you lost the house? You didn’t get injured? I’m always wanting to know the safest place in the home to shelter in place. Sorry for your loss but glad to hear you’re okay & in good spirits.
I remember this, it took us 22 hours to get to Dallas, I'll never forget how hot it was and so slow. We had to alternate turning our car off to save gas, it was terrible. It still gets brought up every now and then when an evacuation is brought up.
I know this is about Rita but as someone who lived in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina I can tell you without a doubt that probably the most horrific thing I have seen or heard about. I lived in North East Louisiana but the kids that came up from the aftermath... the stories I heard and the things I seen were absolutely horrifying. The sheer destruction and raw devastation caused was truly otherworldly.
I love your content Anna
But the Louisianian in me died a little bit when you said "terry-bone-y"
It's Terry-Bone
I really liked this video as a change of pace from the tornado ones and would definitely watch more!
Thanks Carly. Hur. Rita was a Louisiana disaster. ✋🏻Lake Charles. Rita was a mess. Saw so many dead alligators in Cameron Parish. I did work In Katrina, and Rita. With Rita, the victims rolled up their sleeves, and began repairing. That was impossible, with Katrina.
I remember Rita. That hurricane season was horrible! I remember the evacuation process was a disaster. I was watching the news when the bus full of seniors caught on fire. Horrifying 😢
The one good thing is that evacuation procedures have gotten so much better.
I didn’t know there was a hurricane until the Wednesday night before Rita made landfall. I was working and living in Beaumont Tx, my mother was most of my family lived in SW Louisiana. I miraculously was able to get to .I-10E and get to Alabama to be with my sister. My mother didn’t want to leave so she decided to stay in SW Louisiana, she said that was the biggest mistake of her life. I trued and tried to get her to come with me but she refused. When I was able to go back to Texas, my apartment had a tree in the living room. The park around the corner from my apartment had ZERO trees left standing. Originally I was going to evacuate to Dallas Tx but some forecast had Dallas having 110 mph winds. Thankfully nobody in my family lost their life. Sone damage was done to property. It was a scary time.
I wasn’t alive during Rita, but my dad tells me stories about the evacuation, it’s awesome to see a video on Rita and the effect it had on setx/swla
I live in Florida now and I've never lived in Texas but I will never forget Rita because I still feel responsible. I don't know if anybody else did, but I did strongly encourage my friend who lived in Houston in a mobile home to evacuate, with her dogs, in her truck, in the traffic jam, for 9 hours, when it was 90°, and they probably ran out of gas... And in the end they went home and nothing bad happened where they lived. I still feel guilty about this*. Sorry, Linda.
*And especially after all the stress of having one friend who was totally clueless scream and yell at me that I was an idiot for not evacuating for Irma. Despite the fact that I live in a non-evac zone, In Florida, where it would take 5 hours just to get out of the state *if there was no traffic trying to evacuate.*
I grew up in Nederland, TX - a small town right next to Beaumont and Port Arthur - and was 10 years old when this evacuation took place. I missed a good chunk of fifth grade due to the evacuation. It was horrible. We were in the car for over 30 hours with two dogs and four people. The heat was sweltering. Standstill traffic more than half the route. No hotel vacancies anywhere. When we came back home after the storm, many buildings had endured moderate to severe wind damage in our area. A tree crushed the shed in our backyard and just barely missed destroying our entire house. Structures on the main road in our town had been demolished by tornadoes. There was nothing but silence, heat, and a seemingly endless power outage for at least a week after that. I don't think I've ever been through another hurricane that was quite as memorable - I didn't live in Texas during Harvey, so I guess I should count myself lucky. The damage to Crystal Beach after Hurricane Ike was pretty much unfathomable, though, and I saw that with my own eyes. Virtually nothing was left standing.
Rode out Rita, evacuated for Laura. Same path, Both night falls. PTSD from the noises that storm created but not being able to see anything. The sound of a generator is triggering.
2005 when weather became a political tool.
Rita's evacuation disaster is the reason why you didnt see evacuations during Harvey. It literally traumatized the city.
Edit: Rita is also why my mom refused to evacuate for Irma. She saw the track go right up Florida's spine and said, "We are riding this one out."
The evaccuation was tragic, but I'm not sure how it could have been done better given the infrastructure both institutional and physical in tfat part of the country and the United States in general. If it had gone west and hit galveston and no one had evacuated, deaths could have been worse.
I was there in 2005. I was an ER Director at a hospital between New Orleans and Houston Texas. We had just dealt with the huge influx of people from New Orleans traveling across Interstate 10 West to Houston. Many of these people had no resources and were in generational poverty. So they were already desperate. If you recall, that was over 250,000 people. So our resources were already strained. The Mayor of Houston (who later blamed the State and Federal Gov for everything) just saw what happened to the reputation of the Mayor of New Orleans and he wanted to look 'proactive'. He was the main cause of the local hysteria. He played politics and when it backfired, he blamed the other politicians. After Rita, most of us who actually work for a living and don't live off the government came back to destroyed lives yet we quietly rebuilt, not asking the government to bail us out. But that is whole different story.......
I'd like to note: I think part of the reason we were so afraid is because Katrina demonstrated how little the federal government had our collective backs.
We saw there was no depending on them.
Thank you for covering this hurricane. I was a teenager during this storm, and it really felt like no one cared. My family and I lived in LA about 1 hour from the gulf, we left only a few hours before it came in the AM. The feeling outside in dead silence before we left was so intense, I knew we weren’t coming back to the same place we would be leaving.
2005 Hurricane Atlantic season was the most active seasons known recorded history which is scary
I lived in Galveston at the time.
It was a complete shitshow...my towing company was asked to co.e help clear the roads on 10.
I was in Houston during the time. Our power did go out but we weren't totally destroyed thankfully. The problem I think was we were all thinking, rightfully so at the time, of Katrina and how devastating that storm was. While we in Houston dodged a bullet, the storm was still one not to mess with. Still, I could look back and say 'it could easily have been us" if the storm kept going west another day instead of turning north when it did.
That time it was us happened during Hurricane Ike. Far less powerful, but all the more concerning.
I remember looking back as we left our home in Cameron and having this feeling deep down that this time would be different. We had snow during Christmas, the DAY of Christmas. What swamp town in Louisiana on the beach has snow!?!?!?! It was a sign at how bad Rita was going to be ...
Worse was after the storm everyone just guessed you left because of Katrina. And when you mentioned Rita they would act like it did no damage. I know Katrina was awful but people trying to play down Rita's destruction was very upsetting and wrong.
Also worse because a lot of people didn't talk about Cameron Parrish and Louisiana. The amount of devastation that happened because of that hurricane was unbelievable. I wish I could have documented way more. But I also was only 14 and really heartbroken.
The frame of our trailer survive due to it being halfway buried in the mud. Everything around it was like a war zone. It literally felt like someone had dropped a bomb. And the smell of that mud ... That's a smell you don't forget.
It's hard describing how I felt in that moment. Having lost everything including your hometown. It's like it wasn't sadness but just a very deep deep emptiness. A dread that would follow me for the rest of my life.
People speak about loss But they never really talk about loss from a storm. How to handle it and I would can affect you in so many ways. It's truly devastating.
I was 5 at the time of hurricane Rita and I’ll never for the traffic and how terrifying it was.
Forgotten by who? Certainly not Houstonians!
A lot of people have referred to Hurricane Katrina as the deadly daughter of Hurricane Camille. Well if that's the case; then Hurricanes Rita and Wilma are the sisters of Katrina and the granddaughters of Hurricane Betsy. Interestingly enough; New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had lived through Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969, so he knew all too well the severity and potency of Hurricane Katrina. It's why he issued the Civil Emergency message for the New Orleans metro area to get the residents to understand that Katrina will destroy the city and that they should get the Hell out of New Orleans. This is the text:
"Devastating damage expected! Hurricane Katrina; a most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength, rivaling the intensity of Hurricane Camille in 1969. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks; perhaps longer. At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail; leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed. The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rise apartment buildings will be destroyed! Concrete block low rise apartment buildings will sustain major damage; including some wall and roof failure. High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously; a few to the point of total collapse. All windows will be blown out! Airborne debris will be widespread and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles. Sport utility vehicles and light trucks will be moved. The blown debris will create additional destruction. Persons, pets, and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck! Power outages will last for weeks as most power poles will be down and transformers destroyed. Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards! The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted. Only the heartiest will remain standing, but will be completely defoliated. Few crops will remain. Livestock exposed to the winds will be killed. An inland hurricane wind warning is issued when either sustained winds close to hurricane force or frequent gusts at or above hurricane force are certain within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset, do not venture outside!"
We live about 40 miles NW of Houston , we all evacuated to my dad's property near Abeline. It was normally a 6 hour drive, took me 13..with 3 large dogs...
Gosh I am so sorry you all had to go through that. It's unreal the amount of people who were leaving too. I think somewhere around 2.5 million was the total estimate
@@carlyannawx we were the lucky ones ❤️
And I found out I was pregnant the day before Katrina hit...my son just graduated this year😱😁
I live in South Louisiana (Terrebonne Parish) and Rita was a shocker. We had just went through Katrina, and where we live, we did not flood for Katrina. But Rita?! Wow did the south Louisiana flood from the storm surge and the winds. It changed flood maps and zoning laws. People on the bayous had to put their homes in the air if they wanted insurance. Property lost value overnight.
Chauvin for me and yes, so much flooding. It was a devastating year for South Louisiana for sure.
I was living on campus at Nicholls and remember Rita having more devastating effects on Thibodaux than Katrina did. It was awful.
Cameron/creole got deleted... holly beach was completely GONE
When I lived in Florida (Lakeland) in 2006-2009...upon ANY chance of a hurricane making landfall in FL....I would take PTO time, pack up the 5th wheel and I was gone...generally had the roads to myself since I'd leave at sunset/night....I know myself well enough that I know I'd done the same for Katrina and Rita....I don't play that game with catastrophic storms...kind of funny though...I storm chase tornadoes now and don't think twice about it....// 😅
Happy Birthday Carly hope you're having a great day and thank you for doing another brilliant video. Thank you for covering Rita.
I'll never forget the imagery of the Rita evacuation in the Houston area. Seeing all of those freeways congested, with cars even driving on the shoulders (as at 16:03), was simply surreal.
There's a lot that went wrong with the evacuation. I'm not sure if there was a "failure of imagination" on the part of officials when it came to the sheer number of people who evacuated in extreme heat, but it goes to show the role that mass panic can play in evacuation plans. Those 107 deaths could have been avoided.
I'll admit, in today's era, I'm concerned about the role social media could play in triggering a mass panic over an emergency situation. This wasn't really something that had to be considered in 2005, as social media was still in its infancy. Obviously Katrina was fresh on the minds of many people, and I see a parallel (albeit on a smaller scale) between the Rita evacuation and the people driving south from Oklahoma City on May 31, 2013 (the day of the El Reno tornado) as a tornadic storm approached the OKC area; the Moore tornado was fresh on the minds of many, and an on-air meteorologist actually suggested people without an underground shelter evacuate. Tornadic storms are quite different from hurricanes; they move a lot more quickly and unpredictably with a lot less lead time, so evacuation isn't recommended for that particular hazard (slow-moving storms like Jarrell 1997 might be the exception).
0:12 I live there! That footage was likely from Hurricane Ivan, a year earlier. It devastated the area and caused the I-10 bridge to collapse. There are still signs of damage around town, all these years later.
Love your channel!
We evacuated from NW Houston to Austin - normally a 2 hour drive. With 2 dogs and a cat. Took 13 hours. We decided to do a college tour with my then HS Junior-and she ended up going to University of Texas so there is that. I don't think we will ever evacuate again.
I remember this storm all too well. Working for the telephone company I was in charge of tracking hurricanes and assisting in coordinating switch traffic. We had just lost New Orleans switch and had pulled all traffic to either TX or central LA. Now we had to prepare where that traffic would move and coordinate restoration. In one case rescuing techs from the roof of the site that submerged
23:55 that's a picture of a house on Bolivar peninsula during hurricane Ike. One of the only surviving houses. There's a fascinating story around it
It’s pronounced “suh BEAN” just fyi :)
Katrina was awful for so many and affected life in more than just NOLA, but Rita brought damage and impacts to my community in central Louisiana.
I live in Houston. So so so many people evacuated who didn't need to. You had people that lived 50-100 miles from the coast evacuating to Dallas.
And just some info, it's pronounced Suh-Been Pass.
I think the biggest takeaway for me is the importance of planning ahead and organization. There's a reason the evacuation went smoothly in Louisiana and was an utter shit show in Texas - and that's the level of prior planning and organization that was put into how the evacuations are done, who is told to evacuate, and when they are to evacuate. I'm not saying Louisiana's system is perfect either or that Texas's system hasn't improved since then (although I highly doubt the latter). Organization and planning can always be better.
For example, one thing that could have helped move things along would have been at least one "evacuation buses only" lane - this would not only have moved those evacuating by bus faster, it would have encouraged more ppl to leave by bus as well which would result in fewer cars on the roads. Having Amtrak run evacuation routes as well would have also helped speed up evacuation and gotten even more vehicles off the roads.
And ofc not having those outside the evacuation zones evacuate unnecessarily would have been the most helpful. But this was directly after Katrina, so I do understand the panic even though the absolute catastrophe in New Orleans literally couldn't be replicated in the Houston area - even with how incredibly prone to flooding Houston is.
Speaking from the field medical personnel standpoint. It’s unrealistic to stage medical personnel on evacuation routes, field medical personnel, and are notoriously understaffed and they’re going to be utilized and evacuation from hospital facilities and nursing home facilities. There will not be enough manpower to stage any kind of medical personnel throughout evacuation routes unless they utilize military staff.
I was living on the border of Texas and Louisiana in a small town called orange. We had so many beautiful large oak trees but rita has changed the entire area and landscape toppling most of our large oak population and we now have nothing but pine trees because of this.
I also remember evacuation. It was awful and about the only thing i remember plus once we came back the sense of dread when we pulled into our town and saw little to no trees we thought we werent going to have a home, thankfully only one tree fell on our house and was repaired in the following years.
I love that you are doing hurricane videos as that is the number one disaster for SETX and Louisiana. We dont worry about tornadoes but a hurricane? That is were we hang it up.
Thanks for the amazing video ❤
I'm just getting around to watching this video.. my family lived in Lumberton, TX just north of Beaumont when this happened. You did a great job of explaining what happened!
My parents where friends with the police chief of Lumberton, and when the NHC came out with the new graphic of Rita going straight over SE Texas, we got a phone call at 1am that morning telling us to leave before the traffic got bad.. so we escaped the major bulk of the traffic..
What we came back to was both our house, and my grandfathers house being destroyed by trees.. everything as well as the community was nearly unrecognizable! That being said, Hurricane Katrina's damage over shadowed Rita's by a long shot.. I remember sitting in front of a TV watching the weather channel, and a reporter was less than a mile from our house, and he said, "things here are not bad at all" while multiple trees were falling in the background!
Shortly after getting back, and cleaning up for almost a week, we got word that the schools wouldn't open up for the next 3 weeks, and the fact that we were actually homeless, my parents made the decision to relocate us to east Tennessee where our cousins took us under their wing, and helped us start a new life up there!
The amount of emotions as a 12 year old at the time was very numb.. but sitting here as an adult today watching this video, I wanted to actually cry because I thought about everything that happened to us, and how we were treated as refugees of Rita.. The realization of the fact we were truly "the forgotten ones" happened less than a week after the storm because Katrina overshadowed Rita.. I can go into more context, especially with the Katrina refugees coming into our community, but it would be more long winded than this..
Thank you for a great video! My emotions were high during this because it brought back a lot of memories..
please do more hurricane videos !
Thank you for covering a storm that I've always wanted to know more about! Splendid job, young lady...🇺🇸 😎👍☕
Us here in North Carolina were mostly spared the wrath of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season; we really felt for those folks on the Gulf Coast. Up here, Hurricane Ophelia’s eyewall moved over the Crystal Coast region of Carteret County as a Category 1 storm. And now we’re getting a visit from another Ophelia here in 2023. We’ve had two Arthurs, too: a tropical storm in 1996 and a Category 2 hurricane that made landfall in 2014, also along the Crystal Coast.
Having a repeated name obviously means it avoided retirement, so we’ve gotten off relatively easy compared to some. Hopefully this Ophelia blows on by quickly and lets us off easy. Those “F” storms tend to have it out for us; Fran in ‘96, Floyd in ‘99, and Florence in ‘18. All retired. If we’re in the cone of an F storm, even slightly, even five days out, I get major storm anxiety.
The “I” storms bother everyone; we’ve had Isabel in ‘03, Irene in ‘11, and Isaias in 2020. Isaias dropped a fatal tornado in Bertie County that was rated an EF3; the last time an F3/EF3 tornado was produced by a hurricane: Hurricane Rita, fifteen years earlier. Just to bring my trivial post back full-circle.
My experience of Hurricane Rita involved my occupation as an Officer in the
U.S. Merchant Marine. I was called to duty from my leave in N.W. Florida, flying into Houston, TX. I came aboard the Motor Vessel Cape Texas a 635 ft. Roll on- Roll off ship owned by U.S. Navy under the Maritime Administration. Our humanitarian mission was to operate the ship as a refuge for any people around Beaumont, Texas who had been driven from their homes.
This was a FIRST for me as my normal duties
Involve hauling heavy equipment and weapons to war zones. So for me as for most of our crew, this "Mission" was VERY DIFFERENT from ANYTHING we had ever done before. As the storm approached, our ship remained alongside the pier in Beaumont with our loading ramp down. We allowed anyone requesting aid to come aboard. Most folks drove their POVs (Privately Owned Vehicles) aboard. They came in family groups and we gave them army cots, blankets and food. They were allowed to stay on the spacious lower cargo decks. We accommodated everyone as best we could and had NO complaints that I heard of. I was assigned as a 2nd Officer (Navigation) as well as Medical PIC (Person In Charge) as all US Navy MSC/MARAD ships of this class have a small 7 bed hospital aboard as well as up to date medicines and equipment. These ships do go into Harms Way, if required, so they must be READY. Taking care of a civilian group should not have been a problem and it was not.
Everyone, aboard, crew and "Refugees" worked and behaved well.
This mission lasted 72 hours plus or minus. I had come aboard thinking we were being called up to assist in the operation Iraqi Freedom and expected to be going overseas for at LEAST 6 months. We were prepared for ANYTHING, however, as usual, so taking care of our own citizens was ki d of NICE, for me, and a welcome change from the middle eastern deployments I was used to. It was a letdown when I found out, for SURE, we were NOT going to have a regular deployment. I was hoping to stay longer, as I had packed my gear to last for 6 months away.from civilization.
Hurricane Rita was a BIG LETDOWN as well. The winds seldom exceeded 45 knots and the storm tides we had expected only rose 6 feet at most. It did not even rain much. I am used to Hurricanes and Typhoons and Rita, AT LEAST WHERE I WAS, was practically NOTHING. "A TEMPEST IN A TEACUP" as people used to say.
I watched this video and was very surprised at the damages a d the deaths reported.
For MY SHIP, We had NO INJURIES, SICKNESS OR DEATHS, THANK GOD!
.It was the FIRST TI.E I ever heard of our ships being g used in a
Humanitarian Mission, though I believe we did more later, in Hawaii.
I wish to note that the US Navy also operates our Hospital Ships, ie the USNS Comfort, USNS Hope and USNS Mercy (Used during Covid in NY and on the West Coast) and that THOSE ships do humanitarian work.as their MAIN MISSION.
All Ameri ans should remember that all of our ships are manned by the United States Merchant Marine. We have Ranks, we get medals but we are.considered by the Military to be CIVILIANS!
They always CHANGE THEIR OPINION OF US when we go to WAR with them. Anywhere, Anytime, Any Way!
I wish to apologize for this LONG LETTER. I hope it was informative to everyone.
Have a BLESSED DAY!
I was watching the Weather Channel pretty regularly....almost obsessively, from about a few days out from landfall of Katrina on to the end of the season. Living in the middle of tornado alley, (Kansas)....I kept thinking My God! How much more are those poor people going to have to deal with? Tornadoes are nothing to sneeze at, but over and done with relatively quickly. A hurricane just grinds on and on and on....... I do remember that some displaced people/families did relocate up here....a bunch went to Wichita. If I remember correctly, some had family this way, so had familiar faces to greet them. Churches and charitable orgs stepped up and helped out with placement etc for a lot of them. I sincerely hope and pray that 2005 was just a one off, and there's not a repeat....but nature, being what it is, has the final say.
It’s still pretty amazing, 98 tornadoes & 1 death. All the damage from Rita landfall & 1 person drowns. Compared to 100+ ppl dying from traffic. I’m always amazed the storm itself doesn’t result in more deaths considering the damage done to the structures.
A whole lot of people were not aware that backroads would have saved them tremendous grief. It's how I evacuated from Hurricane Laura in 2020. Even though it was projected to hit Beaumont, TX, the hurricane moved east and destroyed Lake Charles, Louisiana. Looking back on the evacuation of Hurricane Laura, it was the right call to leave before mandatory evacuations were put in place. Even then, I would have taken backroads during an evacuation. Just would have made logical sense. Had television stations shown people roads to take to avoid traffic congestion, people would not have died in the heat wave before the hurricane hit. If not so much in Houston, at least in Beaumont, more people would have gotten to their destination taking the every conceivable backroad. The maps of Texas and the county maps would have helped save hours worth of traffic congestion. I was southwest of Houston during Rita and stayed in that area.
That's how my husband and I got from SW Houston to just north of Huntsville in less than 6 hours during the evacuation.
We had made plans to go stay with family up by Huntsville, but had to wait until the afternoon of the big evacuation to leave because we had to work until noon. A group of other family members left the evening before us and only took the freeways. We arrived at the place where we were all staying at a half hour before them. They ended up being on the road for 20 hours straight without exiting the freeway.
I had some really good Texas road atlases and a set of key map books of Harris County and the surrounding counties. We took residential neighborhood roads until we got out of the city and then stuck mostly to county roads until we got close to Huntsville. We cut through the Sam Houston forest on unmarked forestry service roads during the last step of the way to minimize time on the two lane highways near Huntsville because even they were gridlocked.
At one point, when we had no choice but to get out on a little farm to market highway that was backed up solid for a couple of miles, a few cars turned off and followed us through the backroads. I guess they saw me holding up my road atlas and figured we knew where we were going.
It was an adventure but not a fun adventure. I've always enjoyed taking daytrips and using my maps/atlases to explore the back roads, and that skill really came in handy. Because this was well before map apps on phones, and I don't remember many people having GPS devices.
I do wonder if Rita's evacuation informed the shelter-in-place attitude for Harvey.
I was watching the Yellowknife evacuation this summer as I knew someone who was going through it and they made sure that there were all the things in the recommendations were implemented before they started the evacuation. Granted, it was a 1500 km evacuation through isolated areas so it seems obvious to create waystations along the way but wonder if Rita's evac failure created a larger wave than just in Texas. Thanks for the video!
2005 tried its best to whipe out my state #bootup
Calcasieu Parish native here who sure as hell won't forget this thing. What a time that was.
Then there were those of us that had just came back after leaving for Katrina in New Orleans!
I worked at one of the colleges in Houston during this time and this was the first hurricane I’d ever experienced. Five days before landfall there were several students who told me they weren’t coming to class that week and were evacuating to Dallas. Given the misery and horrors of Katrina I immediately excused them for the week. I went home from work that day and packed my things so my ex and I could leave Houston immediately. The next morning, my ex thought it was more important to go to their job than to leave Houston; their job was quite secure, they made good money, and their boss would have been more than understanding given the circumstances. I tried to use logic and reason considering they were a scientifically-minded individual stating that the traffic was going to be an utter shit show the longer we stayed put. We left the day after and, sorry to say, I was right about the traffic heading east on I-10. As the fates would have it though, a relative of mine in Crosby called us while we were en route to Shreveport, LA to check in. I told them that we were on I-10 headed east to Louisiana and were near Winnie (it took 3-4 hours to make it that far). He told us to turn around and stay with him because the dirty side of the storm was going to hit the eastern portion of the Texas coast. My ex and I then made the decision to turn around and head back to Houston given this new information. I remember calling my folks back East to update them on our plans. My mother became hysterical fearing for my life; my dad had to rip the phone out of my mother’s hand and calmly said that he’d handle her and that he trusted our decision-making process knowing that we had accurate information at hand. We headed back to Houston. It was soooo quiet; peacefully so! We watched the cloud bands of the storm gracefully arcing across the sky. We lived close to downtown and traffic was completely non-existent; an impossible condition for the city in typical weather. The winds began to pick up a little and some kids fashioned some sails out of bed sheets and sticks while riding their bikes and skateboards. All the stores were closed. The two of us had dinner, watched a few movies, filled up the bathtubs and then went to bed. We slept through the storm. The next day we woke up and were pleasantly surprised that we still had power and the only thing that fell over was a lawn chair. We went up to the northern part of the city to see how things were going; they had lost power but a neighborhood restaurant was open to feed anyone who showed up. We sat down with folks there and had a lovely lunch; everyone counted their blessings!
Give blaze scritches for us!!!!!
I was a kid when this happened and we lived southwest of houston. The plan was to evacuate to my aunt's house in Houston which was on high elevation. We spent like 3 hours on the road before my dad decides we shouls just go back home. We were home in 20 minutes
My fathers mothers house got ripped off the foundation from surge, and moved half a mile I believe, from rita, it was horrible.
I live in far southeast Houston near I-45 the Gulf Freeway, a major evacuation route for Galveston and other bay area communities. On Thursday morning my husband and I walked to the freeway and saw the gridlock, nobody moving, a sea of cars. On Friday night the wind was picking-up and we walked to the freeway again... eerily empty, like we were the only people in the world. I think one of the problems with the evacuation was that people tried to take too much with them. There were automobiles, trucks, trailers, RV's, boats, all clogging the roads. If a family had three cars then they took all three cars instead of everybody getting into one. Some families had five or seven vehicles on the road.
It was a nightmare i will NEVER do again. We tried to do the right thing. We waited until our evacuation zone was scheduled to leave and by then it was too late. We should have said "F it" and left when WE wanted to leave but no, we tried to do what we were told to do because we THOUGHT the Emergency Manager knew what he was talking about. God what a logistics nightmare. I will never evacuate like that again. We live in a really old wooden house and I'll find a nice brick built hotel here in Houston and take my chances but i promise you i will NEVER evacuate like that again. Many people that i know who were caught in that clusterfuck will never do it again either. I'll take my chances with the hurricane and if it's my time then it's my time but i will not put myself in that situation ever again. 18 hours to get to my sister's house in Sulphur Springs. 18 hours! It's a 5 hour drive, tops, from Houston. You have no idea what 18 hours at basically a snails pace with a three year old was like. Seriously, i'm getting flashbacks just typing this comment 😂
Oh my gosh, my hubby and I were living in Kemah,TX. It was 2 weeks post Katrina and people were scared. It was HOT🥵 & we were stuck on the highway 6 hours. We ended having to go back home as it was nearly impossible to leave. Thank goodness Rita didn’t do much harm, but I’ll NEVER forget it.
I live in calcasieu g remember that evacuation ridiculously vividly for someone in middle school at the time. We went east to Mississippi. What was normally around a 6-8 hour drive to my uncle's house took us 12 hours g we were lucky. The rest of my family going to the same spot took around 21 hours going highway/interstate. My dad has a penchant for the senic route is the only reason we weren't trapped.
Also the spinoff tornadoes in the Mississippi valley were the first tornadoes I'd ever seen outside of "Twister." I knew what they were, but i was absolutely entranced by the several dancing clouds swirling around me. I nearly gave my mom a stroke because I couldn't move to get inside. She literally drug me into the room by the back of my shirt. Just as a disclaimer: I don't recommend this for anyone, i was a stupid 13 year old who had never seen dancing wind before.
😂 Prevent Houston, Texas from experiencing traffic jams with *checks notes* 2.5 MILLION people on the roadways?! 😂 Have you ever BEEN to Houston?!
Having lived this I can say it's exactly the craziness that came from Katrina that brought on Rita. We spend 14 hours getting to Dallas and got lucky enough to find fuel in random places on our way there.
I had just woken up from a nightmare about flooding in the Gulf area and wanted to show a friend your channel - wild that this is your latest video! Rita is still lurking in my brain after all these years.
My family was okay, but we didn't know how they were doing for what felt like a very long time. Grandpa was furious about how poorly managed the evacuation was for the rest of his life, and every family get-together after then included long talks about weather safety. Thank you for covering this.
Hi Carly, i think you might find the story of "cyclone tracy" interesting. This cyclone devastated the Australian city of Darwin 3am Christmas morning 1974. Very interesting story from a weather and human perspective. 80% of buildings destroyed, 40k ppl evacuated with huge amount of these people were severely traumatized and never returned, many never celebrated Christmas ever again. Wind speed measuring equipment failed at 217kmph with estimates of highest speed ranging from 240-280kmph. My comment doesn't do it justice, its up your alley i assure.
You will probably be better off not evacuating....stay home and guard your property!
Unfortunately because Houston has no mass transit, and Texas has no regional mass transit, an evacuation of the entire Houston metro would be impossible with the type of notice a hurricane gives. Our current mayor or governor isn’t going to support anything that doesn’t involve oil, unfortunately this isn’t going to change in the near future.
I rode out the storm when I was a kid it was definitely an experience that stuck with me for many years
I'm curious, what kind of strategy could be recommended or suggested even that would "prevent gridlock traffic"? I mean, HOW would that be done. As someone who's been in those chaotic situations, spontaneous disaster so to speak, I don't have a clue how that could have been avoided. Ideas? By the way, well done video. I watched it in it's entirety and subscribed to the channel.
The evaluation was terrible. My family n I live in houston tx. It took us over 3 hours to get to Katy, tx, when it's supposed to be a 25-minute drive. After 5 hours, my dad made a u turn back home.
Making the decision to give evacuation orders is never a simple one. If you plan to evacuate 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people, you can't really control it all. Some people are going to be harmed or die during the evacuation. Some people who should evacuate won't, and some that shouldn't will. You can't stop people from doing what they are doing (well aside from using military force, I suppose), so the best you can do is harm mitigation. If a large number of people are leaving an area for whatever reason, traffic is going to be gridlocked, that can't be prevented. Offering people supplies and medical care is the best you can do. But trying to save literally everyone is unrealistic, if for no other reason than that if you have a million people, during any one week some of them are going to die, disaster or not. Just like triage in a mass casualty situation, disaster management on a large scale doesn't focus on saving everyone, because you can't.
I remember it took me 2hrs to go from Cypress to Tomball, said not evacuating.
The fact that the evacuation caused more loss of life than the hurricane itself is insane.
How do you prevent people from evacuating that didn't need to? It is easy to arm chair quarterback response plans. Having been a part of disaster response, I can tell you that people are never predictable and all you can do is plan. But the best laid plans will fall apart and often due. How do you stop gridlock when an entire south coast is fleeing? Unfortunately people wait until the last minute (can you blame them? I don't want my home looted either).
GREAT JOB! I recently moved to the area and you got me making a plan here!!
A situation that definitely paid to know backroads.
That's what common sense would mean to me if i had a hurricane behind me and gridlock traffic on the highways ahead of me.
I still remember like it was yesterday, the lines where so long in the gas station and everybody was looking for water due to how hot it was and the worst part was that our car didn’t had a/c 🥴 we where going up north from Houston Tx