With Hurricane Rita closing in, the family of Albert Ruben Sr. drove here Friday morning to a high school basketball auditorium turned hurricane shelter of last resort–after taking the most maddening journey of their lives.
In a caravan of 20 cars, the Ruben family and their neighbors in the coastal town of Texas City had tried to obey the state’s mandatory hurricane evacuation order. After filling their gas tanks and packing food and water, they left on a designated evacuation highway at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday. They hoped to beat the rush and avoid the heat.
Seventeen hours later, they had traveled 60 miles and were stuck in traffic. They had driven most of that time in daytime temperatures of about 100 degrees. To conserve fuel, they didn’t use air conditioning. All public services along the evacuation route–gas, food, water, bathrooms–were closed.
Ruben, 50, a juvenile detention officer in Galveston County, said he saw three ambulances carry away elderly people who had collapsed in the heat of their unmoving cars. His grandchildren, ages 4 and 7, had put on diapers to avoid soiling the car.
“It was like the end of the world,” Ruben said. “You know what it makes you want to do? It makes you want to go home and die. The government done us wrong.”
Ruben and most of his family gave up on the evacuation Thursday afternoon and drove back home to Texas City for the night, having wasted most of their gas. Other family members, including his wife’s mother, decided to soldier on in traffic and head north. Ruben said he hasn’t heard from them and doesn’t know where they are.
On Friday morning, of course, Rita was still coming, and the Ruben family had to do something.
Ten members got back in their cars and went to Milby High School in Houston. Ruben’s daughter, Anitra Esther, a nurse, had been on the phone to police and was told the high school would be a shelter.
They arrived at the school about 8 a.m. Friday. Police out front told them it was full and suggested they drive to a nearby high school basketball auditorium called Barnett Field House.
Police at Milby later said the plan for a shelter at the school was canceled because the school tended to flood in heavy rains.
When the Ruben family found the field house, it was just opening as a shelter. It offered bathrooms and water, but no food, diapers or medicine.
Houston Mayor Bill White has made it clear in repeated interviews that he did not want city residents to look to city shelters as a primary option for riding out the hurricane. After the much-publicized chaos, violence and despair at the Louisiana Superdome and convention center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, White emphasized Friday that his city’s Astrodome and convention center here “are not shelters.”
The mayor even declined to name a shelter where people might go, saying police and emergency personnel will open shelters “without announcements to the general public.”
But the public quickly found Barnett Field House. It was packed by midday.
Police said they were about to close the site to new evacuees but would not turn away people who arrived during the storm, which began to be felt here Friday evening.
“The purpose of opening this place was to give shelter to drivers who had tried to evacuate but got stuck in traffic,” said Houston Police Capt. Steve Jett. Most of the people pouring into the shelter Friday, though, were from the neighborhood.
In his bleacher seat in the Barnett auditorium, Ruben was finding it difficult to get over his anger.
“We are supposed to be the richest country in the world,” he said. “But what I have seen from the government so far is just pitiful.”
