Friday, October 07, 2005
Hurricane Update from Bob Perry
Hurricane Update from Bob Perry, a tango dancer
When it was certain that Hurricane Rita would hit Houston, evacuation of Galveston, which lies south of Houston, was ordered on Thursday followed by an evacuation order for Houston residents by location Friday and Saturday. We left Houston at around 4:00 am Saturday morning in hopes of reaching friends in Luling, Louisiana. Luling is about fifty miles southeast of New Orleans, a five hour drive from Houston. The weather was clear, hot and humid, without a breeze. Traffic was moving slowly but moving.
At around noon traffic came to a slow crawl. Tia's two sons and I got out of the car and walked ahead to stand in the shade of an 18 wheeler. People were walking by us making much more progress than those in cars. I suppose that they had run out of gas or something. To save gas and avoid overheating the engine we would cut the engine and air-conditioner when we were at a standstill. These intermittent stops lasted about ten minutes after we'd move up only one or two car lengths only to stop again.
Around 3:00 pm in 95 degree heat we realized that the overpass which Tia's brother Michael used to drive his car back to Houston was still in view. Since noon we had traveled only the distance of a few football fields. We now had a half of a tank of gas left, other cars were running out of gas or overheating, tempers were flaring, we almost got in to it with some skinheads, and we had only reached the outskirts of the city of Beaumont, not more than than sixty miles from Houston. On the radio, the latest news on hurricane Rita was she would make landfall somewhere between Beaumont, Texas and Lake Charles Louisiana, right where we were headed.
We turned around and headed back to Houston. It took less than an hour to get home. The papers would report that the storm followed its last predicted landfall an spared Houston. However, there was loss of life as a result of Rita and poorly planned evacuations.
On Tuesday, Oct. 4Th I returned to New Orleans to assess the damage to my place, my sister's, and my mother's which we were renting to a family. My sister's place was in excellent condition, the flood waters only reached her front steps.
There was some wind damage to a storage garage in her back yard. My place and my mother's are total losses as are most of the properties in East New Orleans and what's called the lower 9Th ward. New Orleans is a ghost town, no electricity and running water that can't be drunk. It has been said that more than 100,000 former residents will not return. I've been asked to work with a rebuild New Orleans group. The first few lines of the Antonio Jobim tune "Useless landscape" come to mind.
Keep those e-mails coming,
Bob Perry
