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.
Traffic on Highway 19 from Huntsville Crockett was four lines on a 2 Line Highway. The traffic was going 1/2 of a mile per hour. You could walk faster than the cars were moving now. Now they barricade Highway 19 off in Huntsville and you can’t evacuate on 19 in a hurricane anymore.
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.
My wife and I lived in Katy, TX during Rita. She was 9 months pregnant and when we decided three days prior to the storm to evacuate, it was impossible. No fuel, roads gridlocked, 100+ heat during the day. People were dying on the side of the road in traffic. It was crazy. We ended up covering our windows and just riding out the storm which thankfully for us turned east away from Katy. We still watched transformers explode everywhere in the distance.
Lived in Katy at the time as well. Luckily most of the power lines in the area were underground, so we kept power during the storm but there were a ton of places around us that didn't have power or water for a bit. I remember our cat overlord being the most irritated by the storm because he couldn't sleep as much due to the wind noise.
My dad was in Katie, I was in Sugar Land. We sat for 48 hours in Houston before we finally turned around, and it took us 40 minutes to get back home. We lost power for like 3 weeks, but I refused to leave during Ike and rode out Harvey also. I won't ever leave for another hurricane. Katrina is exactly what git everyone in Houston scared.
I lived in NW Houston at the time and I was 7. We tried to evacuate to Dallas and only made it to the woodlands in 11 hours. Then when they announced the storm turned we just went home. Definitely an experience and a disaster I’ll never forget
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.
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 limb drove into the ground and severed our water line.
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.
As an equestrian, this is one of my worst nightmares. I'm from Ontario, Canada so thankfully we don't have to deal with hurricanes but the threat of Forrest fires/evacuations should be taken more seriously. Glad they made it out ok.
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 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 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
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
After 35 years east of Houston, this was the storm that broke me. I was born in Southern Louisiana and lived on the Gulf Coast my entire life, but this one was different. Our 3 hour evacuation route turned into a 27 hour nightmare. What I went through was life-changing and I never want to see this happen again. I survived the evacuation only to watch my hometown be destroyed by this storm. The emotional toll it took on me was the line in the sand. We left 5 years later and never looked back. Thank you Carly for covering this. There are so many more stories about this storm that have never been told. It truly was "The forgotten storm".
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.
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 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.
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.
I heard about this from my mother who was there in the frantic evacuation, I was 1 year old and she had just had a new born 2 weeks earlier. Awful evacuation situation.
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).
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.
The handling of Katrina is what caused the devastation and death. It’s not that the storm itself was especially especially bad (it was very bad) but could have been managed w minimal death like Florida (14 dead) instead the handling of pre landfall all the way to insurance afterwards was egregiously spat on by local state and federal levels. And by bush.
New sub here. Just want to thank you for your coverage of these storms. As a nearly 70 year old resident of both the midwest and the deep south, I've seen many of these storms. Grew up with tornados in SW missouri and hurricanes along the gulf coast. Your writing and delivery bring home both the science and humanity of these events and their consequences. Keep up the great work!
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.
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!
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.
I was a sophomore in college. My college was located about 45 minutes outside of Houston. My older brother and twin sister were with me in college. My brother came to my sister and I college apartment at 3:00a and told us to pack our stuff as we were headed back to Houston because the university was going to shut us in if we remain until 8a. When we made it home, my parents had already decided we would evacuate with some of my uncles, cousins and grandmother. Long story short, it took us 17 hours to get from Houston to Bryan/College Station to stay with relatives. Thank Good the storm didn’t do much damage. We left the next day and it only took us about an hour and a half to get home.
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.
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!!! ❤️❤️
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.
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 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.
Pardon the pun, but it was a perfect storm of events that caused this to happen. The whole of southeast Texas learned so much from that disaster and it will not be duplicated again. It’s not even possible to overstate the psychological aspect.
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.
Thank you for doing this. It seems like everyone forgot this hard hitting storm. I should know...I was in the evacuation from this monster. Luckily we didn't lose anything and saw such devastating things on our way in to check out the damage to our house.
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.
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'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..
Thanks for making this video bringing light to this historical event that shifted the way we think about staying safe during severe hurricanes. It was certainly a life event for me that I remember better than 9/11 seeing people in front of me suffering in the heat. Even myself and my family struggling to bear the heat. It took my family 34 hours to get to our deer lease near Fredericksburg from Houston. A drive that usually took around 5 hours to get to in the sticks of central Texas. You had to pull your car over because of brake fade, you wanted to keep moving with traffic but they would start slipping from getting too hot. I can't imagine what it would be like trying to get out with a manual transmission. Everyone was absolutely miserable and while there was some comradery a lot of it was fend for yourself; we were all panicking - price gouging had also become a thing for water and gas. To add : I remember the news telling us to expect a 26 foot storm surge which would have put the majority of Houston under at least 5 foot of water, much more for the coastal areas. I think that's what got most people to evacuate. They had us thinking it was going to be like New Orleans with their levees breaking.
Not only were people suffering in those traffic jams, but for hours and hours, they looked like sitting ducks. Which was terrifying enough to see on the news, but I can't imagine how it felt waiting for Rita to arrive in your car, with your kids. Never mind that the roads DID clear out before Rita arrived (I think?); the impression was that hundreds of thousands of people were stuck out in the open with a hurricane bearing down on them, and maybe it was only the swerve north that saved them. Watching the news from California, that's my main memory of Rita, even though my mom is from Texas. I'm afraid I'd forgotten Rita had done enough damage to be retired, so I'm glad you brought out the story of the impacted areas. So yeah, many people didn't evacuate for Ike because they'd evacuated for Rita, which had missed their area entirely. But it wasn't just Texans influenced by this disaster. I think many Floridians ignored evacuation orders in the following years partly because of fears of gridlock. The ghost of Rita may even have come into play with hurricane Sandy. By that time, people might not consciously think of Rita, just the hassle and risk of getting caught in evacuation traffic (imagining NYC traffic) during a storm. It's added to the inertia people feel for all kinds of evacuations, not just hurricanes. So if you see policies like contraflow or zone by zone evacuations even far away from Texas, Rita may have been the catalyst, indirectly. (As a side note; this was also right after Toyota Prius, the first practical hybrid, had come onto the market. There were stories of one that had taken 16 hours to drive from Houston to Austin, but hadn't run out of gas, since the engine shut off while idling. I can't remember if I'd already bought mine or not - my Texas grandma passed that year, and that's what I used her money for, my first new car which I drive to this day - but I bet the Rita evacuation was a factor in the minds of more than a few early adopters of the new technology.)
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.
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 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 hope you can feel better about it. It's hurricanes-- you do what you can, and you have plenty of experience because Florida. Sometimes it turns out OK-- and other times it very much does not and there is no substitute for evacuation then. What seemed like a good idea for Rita, even for how it went, was still the best idea at the time given the information you had. And Texas' choices/situation at the time-- well, they have a bit of track record when it comes to handling situations, and that is very much not your fault.
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.
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.......
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
I really appreciate this coverage. I was just a kid when Rita hit, I remember going with my family to help the cleanup after Rita. The family farm in Calcasieu parish never looked the same afterward. Thank you for the informative documentary.
Very good video to watch especially after Hurricanes Helene and Milton had come to fruition for my area. The traffic jams that happened from people evacuating Tampa reminds me of what you described the evacuation for Rita- the scare tactic to evacuate, the diminishing of resources such as gas, water, food, along those evacuation routes.
I just stumbled across this video. It’s WILD to relive the nightmare that this was. I was living off Highway 59 at the time, about 30 miles north east of downtown Houston. We chose not to go anywhere because we saw the absolute madness and chaos firsthand. It’s not even possible to adequately explain what it was like. There were an endless amount of cars completely at a standstill and nobody was going anywhere! It was crazy to watch it unfold and not be able to do anything. Local residents were trying to get water and food to people stuck in the mess, but there was no gas anywhere and no way to help with that. Gas deliveries couldn’t be made along the highway because of the standstill traffic so there was no getting out of it. People were so scared and so many of those people had just been through Katrina because many of them had taken up residence in the area. Seriously…absolute nightmare!
Thank you for creating this video. My family went through Katrina on the Biloxi Gulf Coast. I arrived within days to help them sort through their belongings to see what was fit to keep. Not much was fit to keep as the humidity and heat started growing mold on many items. We had to drive over daily from a small town next to Mobile as a a curfew was in effect. The entire area smelled badly; so badly, that when we got in the car to return to hotel rooms we could smell it in our hair and on our clothes! It was dead animals, rotting food, mold, damp drywall, and other construction damage, furniture, etc. The place looked like it had been bombed out. Even months and years after clean up and reconstruction began it was emotionally depressing to visit there. So many landmarks lost, entire cities gone, and historical places of interest destroyed. While few things can be done as the storm approaches, the educating and informing needs to happen before hurricane season starts and then reinforced with repeated PSAs. People need to have their own plan for evacuating, a place to go, and the ability to tap into their resources from outside their home areas; i.e., ATMs, bank accounts, direct deposits of paychecks and retirement money, etc. I was struck during Katrina at how many people thought finding a hotel room within ten miles was an option! The government should focus evacuation resources on areas they believe are most likely to suffer catastrophic damage from water and winds, including those who are least able to leave an area such as disabled persons, persons who rely upon home health assistance, and seniors including those residing in senior living facilities. The next group should be those, who don't have vehicles, who don't have money, and who don't have family with which to stay even if they can make it to another city. School buses, metro buses, and military buses should be deployed to help with targeted evacuations of those who need support the most. Hospitals and nursing homes should have their own state-approved plans for evacuating their patients. It's easier to return if damage is minimal than to wait and try to get out as the storm enters an area and/or immediately after the storm comes through. Again, when living in places like Florida, or other coastal areas, where there is just one or two interstates to support a mass evacuation, people need to be told which direction in which to travel based upon a plan - not some uni-evacuation, or one-size-fits-all as what happened with Rita. Leaving extra water or ice at spots along the interstate is not going to hack it. The recovery effort starts before the hurricane arrives. I give Gov. Ron DeSantis high marks for his arranging with power companies their overtime employment to begin immediately restoring power. He could teach a Master Class at FEMA. Individuals need to take as much responsibility as they can for being prepared for hurricanes and other emergencies - and not wait on the federal government to show up. Government should come in to start clean up, removal of debris, enforce curfews to avoid looting and stealing, and help people protect their property. Restoring power immediately should be the first priority; that, and clean up. Government should consider staging certain equipment and items required to assist power companies, such as power poles, boom lift trucks, etc. Food distribution should be handled at local schools, libraries, and churches which are close to the people. There should be "sign up" apps for phones for deliveries for home-bound persons and persons without vehicles. Robo calls should go out notifying citizens where in their precinct they will find food, water, ice, and/or medical attention/prescription drugs needs, etc. Medical facilities should resume normal activities as soon as possible to help alleviate stress of delayed medical treatments and support a sense of normalcy. The state should create, maintain, update, and publish a list of bonded and licensed contractors for various home repairs such as roofing, siding, carpentry, etc. to help consumers find qualified persons to help put their homes back together and not be scammed. There's plenty of scamming after these emergencies! People have insurance money, they want their homes back, and they're often not thinking clearly given what they've just been through. The scarcity of resources for construction is also a common theme. The state can do much to put businesses on notice about price gouging, too, and assist with supply delivery to their areas. Thanks again for this video. We know it's matter of time before there's another big storm. But instead of looking at what goes wrong, maybe government needs to be more pro-active. Hey, just my two cents worth.
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.
This is very relevant information given the current situation with Helene and Milton. Today is the last full day for evacuations from Milton. I guess we will see how this plays out
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 was 12 during hurricane Rita. I remember classmate crying and hugging each other on the last day of school before the storm. At the time we lived in West Houston, so we stayed. Our lights went out around 3 am (i was on the phone with my then boyfriend) but within 12 hours we had lights. It was a great bonding experience with the neighborhood.
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
Thank you for the good story telling and what I have endured as a coastal Floridian. I remember all of these storms. It was hard but we are American's and persevere. God Bless...
Thank you for covering this! I went through the Rita evacuation and spent the night in the car stuck on an overpass in downtown Houston. It took us 20 hours just to get from southeast Houston to the Woodlands. We stopped once for gas right off the highway and that ordeal alone took 4 hours. At one point we passed a car that had pulled off to the side of the highway with an elderly woman who was clearly getting overheated. Everyone driving by was offering them water but they said they had water and they needed to get her medical attention at this point. The traffic was far too packed for an ambulance to get through and I still wonder about what happened to that woman. Its all such a surreal thing to have experienced.
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 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'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).
Thanks for shining the light on this storm's impact. In my opinion, it was the worst one I've faced aside from Katrina to date. I'll never forget Rita because I'm from Louisiana, but more than anything, that was the first time I lost someone of true significance. My grandfather passed away on September 23, 2005, just as Rita made landfall. That day was also my mother's birthday. He was in the ICU at North Oaks Hospital in Hammond, LA. He was buried on my birthday, October 1, 2005.
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!
Love to see you "branching out" and doing some hurricane coverage. I live in Florida so we're not really affected by tornadoes. Can definitely relate to hurricanes though, and they are horrendous. Plus it's rough because you have DAYS to be scared and worried. Should I stay? Go? Where? How? Etc....
I survived Hugo, Andrew, Michael, Florence, and Isabel(part of the reason I moved to Alaska), all were extremely catastrophic and left apocalyptic damage, and I will say it is not wise to ever rely on the government to help you. Whenever it comes to Major disasters you need to expect social order is going to break down. This is something you need to plan for. There are definitely cities and states that are better run and better prepare for them than others, but you need to be able to rely on yourself, and have a plan, and then up to three contingencies if that plane doesn't work. Just keep in mind when it looks like your neighborhood has been carpet bombed into oblivion in the aftermath of the hurricane, the government's going to take a while to get to you. Food for thought. This was an excellent video, thank you. If anyone actually read this comment, I hope you have a wonderful day. 🙂
We lucked out MASSIVELY while leaving Houston on I-10 during Rita. We were going west on it and we got in line RIGHT when they opened the Eastbound lane for western heading traffic. We were literally one of the first cars on it. It was smooth sailing for us ALL the way west but we passed miles of upon miles of standstill, bumper to bumper traffic on the other side. It was like seeing an apocalypse.
Since I was just a kid during Rita, this video really put things into perspective and made my memories make more sense. What I remember from Katrina was it just being cloudy, but I still remember being in school and everybody talking about New Orleans. Now I know why my parents were so worried, why my dad boarded up the windows, and why my mom made us stay in the closet for a number of hours even though we weren't in the direct path during landfall. I even remember my mom and dad debating if we should evacuate (even though we weren't in an evac zone) and now I realize why it was such a big deal in those moments. Rita was, in my memory, the first hurricane I really went through. If a similar storm happened today in the gulf, with my meteorology experience now I would be quite worried, unlike blissfully unaware childhood me hah.
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
I was a senior in HS in 2005. We missed most of our school year because of all the hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. Didnt have power for almost a year. And we lived in central Fl.. it was a wild time.
Great video as always. While not inherently a tornado story, it's close enough to your strengths. Really appreciate how measured and thorough you are in all of your content. Keep up the great work!
Great to see you are doing hurricanes now. Love the tornado videos but hurricanes hit a Little closer to home. Live on the east coast and the big bend of Florida saw a lot of devastation this past week but fortunately most people took the warnings seriously and evacuated coastal areas, could have been much worse
Basically everyone who has been on the gulf coast for a decade or more has a tale of woe from a hurricane. Something people who've never experienced a hurricane don't understand is the scale. For a big one, a hundred miles or more of coastline will be effectively out of commission. Lets say you have animals and a farm and are 50 miles inland and you're going to ride it out. Hurricane is a direct hit (within 50 miles of the eye), and everything within 100 mile radius is now closed. No fuel for your generator, no food for your animals, no medicine for your mother/grandpa/whoever. Water is unavailable or boil advisory. Even when things are well organized and responded to from FEMA to the state agencies.... it's a shit show for most people. And, when it goes bad, you get Katrina. Then you have the places that get hit twice or more like Florida in 2004 or SW Louisiana in 2020, the same people smashed by Rita got hit with Laura and Delta.
I wan`t you to know how important you are to me. I can`t sleep so I put your playlist on and listen to your lovely voice all night every night. However weird that might be I can`t help it. I thank you for every video you make and post. I send a huge giant hug to you.
Thank you for covering this hurricane. I went on 2 different trips to help with the rebuild effort. The owners of the house that my group worked on got us sweatshirts and to this day it’s my favorite sweatshirt. I missed senior prom to go down and would do it again.
I almost died stuck on that highway as a kid lol what a crazy time it was trying to get to Dallas. We slept outside a gas station one night and there was a head on collision in the street in front of us bc it was so dark. I can't remember being stuck on the highway but my parents told me I was puking and passing out until a car next to us offered us water and according to them I bounced back like nothing happened. Crazy to think there were others not so lucky
This was a very interesting video. As someone who grew up in South Carolina's low country in the 90's, we experienced the evacuation traffic jam of Hurricane Floyd. We did not have the heat issues Texas experienced before Rita but our evac destination, which was normally 9 hours away, took us 21 hours to reach. The experience was so traumatic for my mother we moved away from SC 2 months after Floyd.
I remember the mess of that evacuation. It was awful! The pronunciation of most of the place names that are difficult can be found on RUclips. I use them all the time for this exact purpose. Some of those names can make me feel like my tongue is trying to jump out of my mouth. LOL I so enjoy your posts on the tornadoes and hurricanes. Excellent work!
Great video as always. I really appreciate the hurricane coverage. I think tornados are interesting but I’ve lived my whole life on the coast so Hurricanes are what I have experience with. Happy birthday
I was about a year old when both these hurricanes hit! I, along with my Dad and Granny, temporarily evacuated to Galveston during Katrina, then moved back (I think) immediately after Katrina dissipated. Couldn’t tell ya what our reactions were to Rita (since I was literally too young to even remember any of it) but, one of the images you used showed a sign that lead to my hometown of the last 19 years, good ole’ Slidell! I now live in Lafayette for the next two years because college, 😂. But, I sincerely hope we never have to experience a twofer for a long time to come. P.S. My Mom did stay in Slidell for Katrina (due to her working for the Times Picayune, the newspaper) and she keeps relaying to me that Katrina was tough on all of us.
The only major hurricane(s) that I vividly remember were Laura and Ida (which I personally lived through) and, let me tell y’all something, having your family huddled up around you in the living room of your house, pitch black, (due to no power for the next day) with the crackling radio beside us and 80-90 mph winds blowing continuously outside is a truly terrifying experience, to say the least!
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.
I was 17 when Rita came through houston. I have family in waco an l always drove there. The day before rita i idled to waco. A 2.5 hour drive turned into a 13 hour drive. Overheated twice. Had to ride with my ac off and windows down in the middle of a 100 degree day. I will never forget it rip to those who passed away just trying to get away.
I loved the coverage of hurricane Rita. Please think about covering the hurricane that hit acapulco. I've been in a lot of hurricanes but that is one of the scariest situations I've ever heard and I'd like your take on it. You cover the science, the culture, and the individual people so well.
Thank you for the informative and factual video, really enjoyed it! I come from (and live in) an area of the world where we never experience hurricanes or similar climate phenomenons, so this was very interesting to listen to. My heart goes out to all those affected by these types of extreme natural disasters.
I was like 9 years old and we evacuated from south east Texas (further east than Houston) to north east Texas. A normally 3.5 hour drive was over 12 hours. My mom tried to make the best out of it but I will never forget how miserable we were after a few hours just melting in the car. However I still evacuate for hurricanes now, we evacuated for Ike and I left for Laura even though it didn’t hit us. My family and I never play around with these storms. A tornado hit my neighborhood during Rita and destroyed our garage but I can’t imagine how traumatizing that would have been to stay through, then 2+ weeks without power after.
I lived in Leesville Louisiana through both Katrina and Rita. Rita made a pretty direct hit to us, the windows in the house I was in blew in! Our town had to ration gas and food. I always felt Rita didn't was forgotten, thanks for giving it the coverage it deserved.
I was In Baton Rouge then and remember the stress in light of the Katrina debacle. It really had little impact there as we only lost power for a coupla hours which was quite a relief after being without for the better part of a week during Katrina. Baton Rouge was never the same after the one two punch of these storms as all of the riff raff from NOLA moved into BR and our sleepy little town turned into a crime riddled haven which has never recovered. I moved out of state when I retired to get away from what can only be described as a cess pool!😟
A suggestion for your next one. How about one where the the government and private sector meteorologists worked together and casualties were a minimum during worst case scenarios. Suggestions for that are the Topeka F5 of 1966, the Twin Cities outbreak of 1965, St Louis area on April 22 2011, or Omaha 1975. I look forward to all your uploads. You're a true phenom in documenting all of these events. If I ever met you I would buy you a drink and shake your hand. Thank you for your work on documenting all of these events
I found this while looking something else up. Excellent video. Having lived through this storm (I was 13 at the time) which I consider my first time experiencing a tropical cyclone like this, I definitely feel like Rita does get forgotten. I grew up north of Beaumont, TX & my family took in evacuees - my grandparents & their neighbor who lived in Beaumont & my aunt, uncle & cousin who lived in Bridge City, TX (a town that was spared the storm surge in Rita but was definitely not during Ike less than 4 years later). It was definitely an experience. Some of the scariest sounds I've ever heard (& it doesn't help when you live in a metal building) but we were safe & only lost some trees. Unfortunately, we were stuck for a few days because of a tree across the road. Someone cleared the debris & we went over to The Woodlands, TX where a family friend found 2 hotel rooms my family (my parents, brother & me) & my grandparents & their neighbor (aunt, uncle & cousin picked up my cousin's fiance & went to Destin, FL). One of the positives was that time my brother & I spent with our Paw-Paw during that time because he became sick that winter & died of lung cancer (due to asbestos exposure) in February 2006. One note about the Hurricane Rita evacuation deaths that is worth mentioning - 23 deaths were due to a bus evacuating nursing home residents that caught fire on I-45.
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!
Traffic on Highway 19 from Huntsville Crockett was four lines on a 2 Line Highway. The traffic was going 1/2 of a mile per hour. You could walk faster than the cars were moving now. Now they barricade Highway 19 off in Huntsville and you can’t evacuate on 19 in a hurricane anymore.
Even in 2005 I would have told that teacher to go to hell
@spirals73 if you hold grades as more important than lives, you really shouldn’t be a parent.
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.
My wife and I lived in Katy, TX during Rita. She was 9 months pregnant and when we decided three days prior to the storm to evacuate, it was impossible. No fuel, roads gridlocked, 100+ heat during the day. People were dying on the side of the road in traffic. It was crazy. We ended up covering our windows and just riding out the storm which thankfully for us turned east away from Katy. We still watched transformers explode everywhere in the distance.
Lived in Katy at the time as well. Luckily most of the power lines in the area were underground, so we kept power during the storm but there were a ton of places around us that didn't have power or water for a bit. I remember our cat overlord being the most irritated by the storm because he couldn't sleep as much due to the wind noise.
@@firecwby1999 Overlord is an awesome name
My dad was in Katie, I was in Sugar Land. We sat for 48 hours in Houston before we finally turned around, and it took us 40 minutes to get back home. We lost power for like 3 weeks, but I refused to leave during Ike and rode out Harvey also. I won't ever leave for another hurricane. Katrina is exactly what git everyone in Houston scared.
Pretty much the area you were in at that time was akin to that of a F4/F5 tornado in your area, which mind you, man, that's terrifying.
I lived in NW Houston at the time and I was 7. We tried to evacuate to Dallas and only made it to the woodlands in 11 hours. Then when they announced the storm turned we just went home. Definitely an experience and a disaster I’ll never forget
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.
Yup, I said adios after I retired and 10 hurricanes later...I will always have LA PTSD😵💫
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 limb 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.
I was driving south on i75 for irma and Ian the day before impact. Felt weird to be the only vehicle southbound while northbound was packed
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.
As an equestrian, this is one of my worst nightmares. I'm from Ontario, Canada so thankfully we don't have to deal with hurricanes but the threat of Forrest fires/evacuations should be taken more seriously. Glad they made it out ok.
poor woman. poor animals
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 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 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.
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.
After 35 years east of Houston, this was the storm that broke me. I was born in Southern Louisiana and lived on the Gulf Coast my entire life, but this one was different. Our 3 hour evacuation route turned into a 27 hour nightmare. What I went through was life-changing and I never want to see this happen again. I survived the evacuation only to watch my hometown be destroyed by this storm. The emotional toll it took on me was the line in the sand. We left 5 years later and never looked back. Thank you Carly for covering this. There are so many more stories about this storm that have never been told. It truly was "The forgotten storm".
Where did ya'll move to?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
I heard about this from my mother who was there in the frantic evacuation, I was 1 year old and she had just had a new born 2 weeks earlier. Awful evacuation situation.
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).
What a shitty story lol
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.
The handling of Katrina is what caused the devastation and death. It’s not that the storm itself was especially especially bad (it was very bad) but could have been managed w minimal death like Florida (14 dead) instead the handling of pre landfall all the way to insurance afterwards was egregiously spat on by local state and federal levels. And by bush.
New sub here. Just want to thank you for your coverage of these storms. As a nearly 70 year old resident of both the midwest and the deep south, I've seen many of these storms. Grew up with tornados in SW missouri and hurricanes along the gulf coast. Your writing and delivery bring home both the science and humanity of these events and their consequences. Keep up the great work!
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.
@@CherokeeDragon Leave earlier.
@@jerrypolverino6025 Oh WOW, I would have NEVER thought of that. (-_-) It was my parents decision and I was helping them.
@@CherokeeDragon Read my post below.
@CherokeeDragon That dude man. It's not always easy and I'm sure your family did everything they could. Cynical people man😔
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!
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.
I was a sophomore in college. My college was located about 45 minutes outside of Houston. My older brother and twin sister were with me in college. My brother came to my sister and I college apartment at 3:00a and told us to pack our stuff as we were headed back to Houston because the university was going to shut us in if we remain until 8a. When we made it home, my parents had already decided we would evacuate with some of my uncles, cousins and grandmother. Long story short, it took us 17 hours to get from Houston to Bryan/College Station to stay with relatives. Thank Good the storm didn’t do much damage. We left the next day and it only took us about an hour and a half to get home.
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.
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
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.
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
"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
Pardon the pun, but it was a perfect storm of events that caused this to happen. The whole of southeast Texas learned so much from that disaster and it will not be duplicated again. It’s not even possible to overstate the psychological aspect.
I could literally watch your videos all day, such a great job at covering the entire story of every situation.
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.
Thank you for doing this. It seems like everyone forgot this hard hitting storm. I should know...I was in the evacuation from this monster. Luckily we didn't lose anything and saw such devastating things on our way in to check out the damage to our house.
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.
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'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..
Are you still in East TN? How are you holding up?
Thanks for making this video bringing light to this historical event that shifted the way we think about staying safe during severe hurricanes. It was certainly a life event for me that I remember better than 9/11 seeing people in front of me suffering in the heat. Even myself and my family struggling to bear the heat.
It took my family 34 hours to get to our deer lease near Fredericksburg from Houston. A drive that usually took around 5 hours to get to in the sticks of central Texas. You had to pull your car over because of brake fade, you wanted to keep moving with traffic but they would start slipping from getting too hot. I can't imagine what it would be like trying to get out with a manual transmission. Everyone was absolutely miserable and while there was some comradery a lot of it was fend for yourself; we were all panicking - price gouging had also become a thing for water and gas.
To add : I remember the news telling us to expect a 26 foot storm surge which would have put the majority of Houston under at least 5 foot of water, much more for the coastal areas. I think that's what got most people to evacuate. They had us thinking it was going to be like New Orleans with their levees breaking.
Not only were people suffering in those traffic jams, but for hours and hours, they looked like sitting ducks. Which was terrifying enough to see on the news, but I can't imagine how it felt waiting for Rita to arrive in your car, with your kids.
Never mind that the roads DID clear out before Rita arrived (I think?); the impression was that hundreds of thousands of people were stuck out in the open with a hurricane bearing down on them, and maybe it was only the swerve north that saved them.
Watching the news from California, that's my main memory of Rita, even though my mom is from Texas. I'm afraid I'd forgotten Rita had done enough damage to be retired, so I'm glad you brought out the story of the impacted areas.
So yeah, many people didn't evacuate for Ike because they'd evacuated for Rita, which had missed their area entirely. But it wasn't just Texans influenced by this disaster. I think many Floridians ignored evacuation orders in the following years partly because of fears of gridlock. The ghost of Rita may even have come into play with hurricane Sandy. By that time, people might not consciously think of Rita, just the hassle and risk of getting caught in evacuation traffic (imagining NYC traffic) during a storm. It's added to the inertia people feel for all kinds of evacuations, not just hurricanes.
So if you see policies like contraflow or zone by zone evacuations even far away from Texas, Rita may have been the catalyst, indirectly.
(As a side note; this was also right after Toyota Prius, the first practical hybrid, had come onto the market. There were stories of one that had taken 16 hours to drive from Houston to Austin, but hadn't run out of gas, since the engine shut off while idling. I can't remember if I'd already bought mine or not - my Texas grandma passed that year, and that's what I used her money for, my first new car which I drive to this day - but I bet the Rita evacuation was a factor in the minds of more than a few early adopters of the new technology.)
I really liked this video as a change of pace from the tornado ones and would definitely watch more!
It’s ALWAYS a great day when a new Carly video is out!
Awesome content as always!!
Watching this as ppl prep for Milton and try to recover from Helene 😢
it was bad..😢
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. ♥️
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.
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 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 hope you can feel better about it. It's hurricanes-- you do what you can, and you have plenty of experience because Florida. Sometimes it turns out OK-- and other times it very much does not and there is no substitute for evacuation then. What seemed like a good idea for Rita, even for how it went, was still the best idea at the time given the information you had. And Texas' choices/situation at the time-- well, they have a bit of track record when it comes to handling situations, and that is very much not your fault.
Thank you for covering a storm that I've always wanted to know more about! Splendid job, young lady...🇺🇸 😎👍☕
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.
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.......
You did good till you started spewing the complainer bullshit about the gov. I see why u manifest negativity the storm was born for you lmao.
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
Every 10-12 years, it seems.
I really appreciate this coverage. I was just a kid when Rita hit, I remember going with my family to help the cleanup after Rita. The family farm in Calcasieu parish never looked the same afterward. Thank you for the informative documentary.
Very good video to watch especially after Hurricanes Helene and Milton had come to fruition for my area. The traffic jams that happened from people evacuating Tampa reminds me of what you described the evacuation for Rita- the scare tactic to evacuate, the diminishing of resources such as gas, water, food, along those evacuation routes.
Yep!!! The Milton evacuations reminded me of this.
Right it's eerie
Thanks! Happy birthday! Awesome video
I just stumbled across this video. It’s WILD to relive the nightmare that this was. I was living off Highway 59 at the time, about 30 miles north east of downtown Houston. We chose not to go anywhere because we saw the absolute madness and chaos firsthand. It’s not even possible to adequately explain what it was like. There were an endless amount of cars completely at a standstill and nobody was going anywhere! It was crazy to watch it unfold and not be able to do anything. Local residents were trying to get water and food to people stuck in the mess, but there was no gas anywhere and no way to help with that. Gas deliveries couldn’t be made along the highway because of the standstill traffic so there was no getting out of it. People were so scared and so many of those people had just been through Katrina because many of them had taken up residence in the area. Seriously…absolute nightmare!
Happy Birthday Carly hope you're having a great day and thank you for doing another brilliant video. Thank you for covering Rita.
Thank you for creating this video. My family went through Katrina on the Biloxi Gulf Coast. I arrived within days to help them sort through their belongings to see what was fit to keep. Not much was fit to keep as the humidity and heat started growing mold on many items. We had to drive over daily from a small town next to Mobile as a a curfew was in effect. The entire area smelled badly; so badly, that when we got in the car to return to hotel rooms we could smell it in our hair and on our clothes! It was dead animals, rotting food, mold, damp drywall, and other construction damage, furniture, etc. The place looked like it had been bombed out. Even months and years after clean up and reconstruction began it was emotionally depressing to visit there. So many landmarks lost, entire cities gone, and historical places of interest destroyed.
While few things can be done as the storm approaches, the educating and informing needs to happen before hurricane season starts and then reinforced with repeated PSAs. People need to have their own plan for evacuating, a place to go, and the ability to tap into their resources from outside their home areas; i.e., ATMs, bank accounts, direct deposits of paychecks and retirement money, etc. I was struck during Katrina at how many people thought finding a hotel room within ten miles was an option!
The government should focus evacuation resources on areas they believe are most likely to suffer catastrophic damage from water and winds, including those who are least able to leave an area such as disabled persons, persons who rely upon home health assistance, and seniors including those residing in senior living facilities. The next group should be those, who don't have vehicles, who don't have money, and who don't have family with which to stay even if they can make it to another city.
School buses, metro buses, and military buses should be deployed to help with targeted evacuations of those who need support the most. Hospitals and nursing homes should have their own state-approved plans for evacuating their patients. It's easier to return if damage is minimal than to wait and try to get out as the storm enters an area and/or immediately after the storm comes through.
Again, when living in places like Florida, or other coastal areas, where there is just one or two interstates to support a mass evacuation, people need to be told which direction in which to travel based upon a plan - not some uni-evacuation, or one-size-fits-all as what happened with Rita. Leaving extra water or ice at spots along the interstate is not going to hack it. The recovery effort starts before the hurricane arrives. I give Gov. Ron DeSantis high marks for his arranging with power companies their overtime employment to begin immediately restoring power. He could teach a Master Class at FEMA.
Individuals need to take as much responsibility as they can for being prepared for hurricanes and other emergencies - and not wait on the federal government to show up. Government should come in to start clean up, removal of debris, enforce curfews to avoid looting and stealing, and help people protect their property. Restoring power immediately should be the first priority; that, and clean up. Government should consider staging certain equipment and items required to assist power companies, such as power poles, boom lift trucks, etc.
Food distribution should be handled at local schools, libraries, and churches which are close to the people. There should be "sign up" apps for phones for deliveries for home-bound persons and persons without vehicles. Robo calls should go out notifying citizens where in their precinct they will find food, water, ice, and/or medical attention/prescription drugs needs, etc. Medical facilities should resume normal activities as soon as possible to help alleviate stress of delayed medical treatments and support a sense of normalcy.
The state should create, maintain, update, and publish a list of bonded and licensed contractors for various home repairs such as roofing, siding, carpentry, etc. to help consumers find qualified persons to help put their homes back together and not be scammed. There's plenty of scamming after these emergencies! People have insurance money, they want their homes back, and they're often not thinking clearly given what they've just been through. The scarcity of resources for construction is also a common theme. The state can do much to put businesses on notice about price gouging, too, and assist with supply delivery to their areas.
Thanks again for this video. We know it's matter of time before there's another big storm. But instead of looking at what goes wrong, maybe government needs to be more pro-active. Hey, just my two cents worth.
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.
This is very relevant information given the current situation with Helene and Milton. Today is the last full day for evacuations from Milton. I guess we will see how this plays out
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 was 12 during hurricane Rita. I remember classmate crying and hugging each other on the last day of school before the storm. At the time we lived in West Houston, so we stayed. Our lights went out around 3 am (i was on the phone with my then boyfriend) but within 12 hours we had lights. It was a great bonding experience with the neighborhood.
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😱😁
The reason that there were so many cars on the freeways 🤔 I stayed put in Houston………………
Thank you for the good story telling and what I have endured as a coastal Floridian. I remember all of these storms. It was hard but we are American's and persevere. God Bless...
Thank you for covering this! I went through the Rita evacuation and spent the night in the car stuck on an overpass in downtown Houston. It took us 20 hours just to get from southeast Houston to the Woodlands. We stopped once for gas right off the highway and that ordeal alone took 4 hours. At one point we passed a car that had pulled off to the side of the highway with an elderly woman who was clearly getting overheated. Everyone driving by was offering them water but they said they had water and they needed to get her medical attention at this point. The traffic was far too packed for an ambulance to get through and I still wonder about what happened to that woman. Its all such a surreal thing to have experienced.
So all these people were traveling from Houston to get a few miles further north of the storm? And where did all of these people end up lodging?
I hope you do more Hurricane related content. Your ability to tell stories and articulate your thoughts in these videos are great
Was watching your Livestream today and it kinda went out. I came to check out some of your taped videos for a history lesson. 😺
A grim story but narrated so well I was encouraged to watch to the end. I am pleased to have found Carly’s channel.
😊
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 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'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).
You're such a gifted and eloquent storyteller. You have a very calm tone and have done excellent research here. Fantastic job!!
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
Wow. Thank you for covering this. Hopefully better escape routes and planning can be in future. Sad to hear of the needless losses of lives
Thanks for shining the light on this storm's impact. In my opinion, it was the worst one I've faced aside from Katrina to date. I'll never forget Rita because I'm from Louisiana, but more than anything, that was the first time I lost someone of true significance. My grandfather passed away on September 23, 2005, just as Rita made landfall. That day was also my mother's birthday. He was in the ICU at North Oaks Hospital in Hammond, LA. He was buried on my birthday, October 1, 2005.
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!
Love to see you "branching out" and doing some hurricane coverage. I live in Florida so we're not really affected by tornadoes. Can definitely relate to hurricanes though, and they are horrendous. Plus it's rough because you have DAYS to be scared and worried. Should I stay? Go? Where? How? Etc....
Wow. This has FANTASTIC production quality. One of my new favorite work-binge channels!!!
I survived Hugo, Andrew, Michael, Florence, and Isabel(part of the reason I moved to Alaska), all were extremely catastrophic and left apocalyptic damage, and I will say it is not wise to ever rely on the government to help you. Whenever it comes to Major disasters you need to expect social order is going to break down. This is something you need to plan for. There are definitely cities and states that are better run and better prepare for them than others, but you need to be able to rely on yourself, and have a plan, and then up to three contingencies if that plane doesn't work. Just keep in mind when it looks like your neighborhood has been carpet bombed into oblivion in the aftermath of the hurricane, the government's going to take a while to get to you. Food for thought.
This was an excellent video, thank you.
If anyone actually read this comment, I hope you have a wonderful day. 🙂
We lucked out MASSIVELY while leaving Houston on I-10 during Rita. We were going west on it and we got in line RIGHT when they opened the Eastbound lane for western heading traffic. We were literally one of the first cars on it. It was smooth sailing for us ALL the way west but we passed miles of upon miles of standstill, bumper to bumper traffic on the other side. It was like seeing an apocalypse.
Since I was just a kid during Rita, this video really put things into perspective and made my memories make more sense. What I remember from Katrina was it just being cloudy, but I still remember being in school and everybody talking about New Orleans. Now I know why my parents were so worried, why my dad boarded up the windows, and why my mom made us stay in the closet for a number of hours even though we weren't in the direct path during landfall. I even remember my mom and dad debating if we should evacuate (even though we weren't in an evac zone) and now I realize why it was such a big deal in those moments. Rita was, in my memory, the first hurricane I really went through. If a similar storm happened today in the gulf, with my meteorology experience now I would be quite worried, unlike blissfully unaware childhood me hah.
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
I was a senior in HS in 2005. We missed most of our school year because of all the hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. Didnt have power for almost a year. And we lived in central Fl.. it was a wild time.
Great video as always. While not inherently a tornado story, it's close enough to your strengths. Really appreciate how measured and thorough you are in all of your content. Keep up the great work!
Great to see you are doing hurricanes now. Love the tornado videos but hurricanes hit a Little closer to home. Live on the east coast and the big bend of Florida saw a lot of devastation this past week but fortunately most people took the warnings seriously and evacuated coastal areas, could have been much worse
Basically everyone who has been on the gulf coast for a decade or more has a tale of woe from a hurricane. Something people who've never experienced a hurricane don't understand is the scale. For a big one, a hundred miles or more of coastline will be effectively out of commission.
Lets say you have animals and a farm and are 50 miles inland and you're going to ride it out. Hurricane is a direct hit (within 50 miles of the eye), and everything within 100 mile radius is now closed. No fuel for your generator, no food for your animals, no medicine for your mother/grandpa/whoever. Water is unavailable or boil advisory. Even when things are well organized and responded to from FEMA to the state agencies.... it's a shit show for most people. And, when it goes bad, you get Katrina.
Then you have the places that get hit twice or more like Florida in 2004 or SW Louisiana in 2020, the same people smashed by Rita got hit with Laura and Delta.
I wan`t you to know how important you are to me. I can`t sleep so I put your playlist on and listen to your lovely voice all night every night. However weird that might be I can`t help it. I thank you for every video you make and post. I send a huge giant hug to you.
Another great job! Thanks for reminding me of this . Such sad loss of life…..in traffic.
Thank you for covering this hurricane. I went on 2 different trips to help with the rebuild effort. The owners of the house that my group worked on got us sweatshirts and to this day it’s my favorite sweatshirt. I missed senior prom to go down and would do it again.
I almost died stuck on that highway as a kid lol what a crazy time it was trying to get to Dallas. We slept outside a gas station one night and there was a head on collision in the street in front of us bc it was so dark. I can't remember being stuck on the highway but my parents told me I was puking and passing out until a car next to us offered us water and according to them I bounced back like nothing happened. Crazy to think there were others not so lucky
This was a very interesting video. As someone who grew up in South Carolina's low country in the 90's, we experienced the evacuation traffic jam of Hurricane Floyd. We did not have the heat issues Texas experienced before Rita but our evac destination, which was normally 9 hours away, took us 21 hours to reach. The experience was so traumatic for my mother we moved away from SC 2 months after Floyd.
I remember the mess of that evacuation. It was awful!
The pronunciation of most of the place names that are difficult can be found on RUclips. I use them all the time for this exact purpose. Some of those names can make me feel like my tongue is trying to jump out of my mouth. LOL
I so enjoy your posts on the tornadoes and hurricanes. Excellent work!
I am so impressed by you, Carly Anna, for how you inform with precise knowledge and huge empathy. Thankyou!❤
Another great vid! Love hurricane coverage as well as the tornados.
Great video as always. I really appreciate the hurricane coverage. I think tornados are interesting but I’ve lived my whole life on the coast so Hurricanes are what I have experience with. Happy birthday
I was about a year old when both these hurricanes hit! I, along with my Dad and Granny, temporarily evacuated to Galveston during Katrina, then moved back (I think) immediately after Katrina dissipated. Couldn’t tell ya what our reactions were to Rita (since I was literally too young to even remember any of it) but, one of the images you used showed a sign that lead to my hometown of the last 19 years, good ole’ Slidell! I now live in Lafayette for the next two years because college, 😂. But, I sincerely hope we never have to experience a twofer for a long time to come.
P.S. My Mom did stay in Slidell for Katrina (due to her working for the Times Picayune, the newspaper) and she keeps relaying to me that Katrina was tough on all of us.
The only major hurricane(s) that I vividly remember were Laura and Ida (which I personally lived through) and, let me tell y’all something, having your family huddled up around you in the living room of your house, pitch black, (due to no power for the next day) with the crackling radio beside us and 80-90 mph winds blowing continuously outside is a truly terrifying experience, to say the least!
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.
I was 17 when Rita came through houston. I have family in waco an l always drove there. The day before rita i idled to waco. A 2.5 hour drive turned into a 13 hour drive. Overheated twice. Had to ride with my ac off and windows down in the middle of a 100 degree day. I will never forget it rip to those who passed away just trying to get away.
I loved the coverage of hurricane Rita. Please think about covering the hurricane that hit acapulco. I've been in a lot of hurricanes but that is one of the scariest situations I've ever heard and I'd like your take on it. You cover the science, the culture, and the individual people so well.
Top notch video. Great coverage of an event I honestly didn’t know a lot about. It really made me think a lot.
Thank you for the informative and factual video, really enjoyed it! I come from (and live in) an area of the world where we never experience hurricanes or similar climate phenomenons, so this was very interesting to listen to. My heart goes out to all those affected by these types of extreme natural disasters.
I was like 9 years old and we evacuated from south east Texas (further east than Houston) to north east Texas. A normally 3.5 hour drive was over 12 hours. My mom tried to make the best out of it but I will never forget how miserable we were after a few hours just melting in the car. However I still evacuate for hurricanes now, we evacuated for Ike and I left for Laura even though it didn’t hit us. My family and I never play around with these storms. A tornado hit my neighborhood during Rita and destroyed our garage but I can’t imagine how traumatizing that would have been to stay through, then 2+ weeks without power after.
I lived in Leesville Louisiana through both Katrina and Rita. Rita made a pretty direct hit to us, the windows in the house I was in blew in! Our town had to ration gas and food. I always felt Rita didn't was forgotten, thanks for giving it the coverage it deserved.
I was In Baton Rouge then and remember the stress in light of the Katrina debacle. It really had little impact there as we only lost power for a coupla hours which was quite a relief after being without for the better part of a week during Katrina. Baton Rouge was never the same after the one two punch of these storms as all of the riff raff from NOLA moved into BR and our sleepy little town turned into a crime riddled haven which has never recovered. I moved out of state when I retired to get away from what can only be described as a cess pool!😟
A suggestion for your next one. How about one where the the government and private sector meteorologists worked together and casualties were a minimum during worst case scenarios. Suggestions for that are the Topeka F5 of 1966, the Twin Cities outbreak of 1965, St Louis area on April 22 2011, or Omaha 1975. I look forward to all your uploads. You're a true phenom in documenting all of these events. If I ever met you I would buy you a drink and shake your hand. Thank you for your work on documenting all of these events
I found this while looking something else up. Excellent video. Having lived through this storm (I was 13 at the time) which I consider my first time experiencing a tropical cyclone like this, I definitely feel like Rita does get forgotten.
I grew up north of Beaumont, TX & my family took in evacuees - my grandparents & their neighbor who lived in Beaumont & my aunt, uncle & cousin who lived in Bridge City, TX (a town that was spared the storm surge in Rita but was definitely not during Ike less than 4 years later).
It was definitely an experience. Some of the scariest sounds I've ever heard (& it doesn't help when you live in a metal building) but we were safe & only lost some trees. Unfortunately, we were stuck for a few days because of a tree across the road.
Someone cleared the debris & we went over to The Woodlands, TX where a family friend found 2 hotel rooms my family (my parents, brother & me) & my grandparents & their neighbor (aunt, uncle & cousin picked up my cousin's fiance & went to Destin, FL).
One of the positives was that time my brother & I spent with our Paw-Paw during that time because he became sick that winter & died of lung cancer (due to asbestos exposure) in February 2006.
One note about the Hurricane Rita evacuation deaths that is worth mentioning - 23 deaths were due to a bus evacuating nursing home residents that caught fire on I-45.