WP: The Trip Back (to Houston) Begins Better Than Evacuation

[DeepModem Mom]

The Trip Back Begins Better Than Evacuation
By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 26, 2005; Page A14


....Some of the estimated 2.5 million evacuees began trickling back home to Houston and surrounding Gulf Coast communities on Sunday. Despite intense scrutiny by local officials and media to see how drivers would fare during the reentry, there were no headline-grabbing incidents. Highways leading south and east into Houston and Harris County were buzzing with cars, but there were no bumper-to-bumper 200-mile backups. There were no overheated cars, no people pushing cars to conserve fuel and few, if any, cars abandoned along the service roads.

Whether residents were heeding the pleas of state and local officials to return according to a staggered three-day reentry plan was unclear. What was apparent was that at least for Sunday, residents managed to get home in Rita's aftermath with relative ease.

The reentry plan divided the city and county into three areas and asked residents to return voluntarily in shifts Sunday, Monday and Tuesday....In an attempt to prevent an immediate repopulation of the area and avoid massive traffic jams, schools, local government and court officials and some private employers announced over the weekend that they would remain closed Monday and perhaps Tuesday and Wednesday. But some workers were told to report to back immediately to get the huge metropolitan area back to normal. They included employees of area hospitals, other health care facilities and pharmacies; the two major airports; gasoline stations; grocery and convenience stores; and refineries. In particular, White made a televised appeal to the owners of gas stations, which largely remained shuttered in and around Houston....

***

The state's failure to ensure adequate fuel along evacuation routes and delaying the opening of contra-flow lanes on interstate highways leading out of Houston -- along with residents' overwhelming desire to leave, whether or not they lived in a mandatory evacuation zone -- overwhelmed the highways Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in advance of Rita. As many as 18 hours before Rita struck the Texas coast near Louisiana early Saturday, the storm was forecast to be barreling toward Galveston and Houston as a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. Texans had the images of the death and destruction wrought just three weeks before by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/25/AR2005092501370.html?sub=AR

[fasttense]

1. Interesting.

"Despite intense scrutiny by local officials and media to see how drivers would fare during the reentry, there were no headline-grabbing incidents."

No headline grabbing incidents yet they reported it anyway. Hmmmm....