OxfordPress.com

Rita pursues two-time evacuees northward

LUFKIN, Texas — Four weeks ago, Bobby Burnett and his family escaped Hurricane Katrina after climbing on the roof of their New Orleans home. They escaped by boat and had been staying in a motel in Houston.

But with another strong hurricane, Rita, bearing down on the Gulf Coast, motel employees put fliers on the doors of their rooms to let the Burnetts know that "it was best for us to leave."

The Burnetts spent more than 24 hours in traffic to reach Lufkin, where they tried to get gasoline, so they could keep driving, probably to Arkansas. Burnett had gotten no sleep. "It's rough, man," he said.

Meanwhile, the path of Hurricane Rita had shifted easterly, as if following the Burnetts and hundreds of others northward through East Texas.

Another New Orleans family, including 8-year-old Brandon Pollard, also had been evacuated to Houston after Katrina. Like the Burnetts, the double evacuees attempted to drive to Arkansas.

But the Pollards ran out of gas in Lufkin, where evacuee shelters were full and officials were directing those fleeing the hurricane to keep moving.

Lufkin, already a temporary home to hundreds of evacuees from both hurricanes, found room for scores of other visitors overnight Friday. City Manager Paul Parker said several hundred people had been housed at the county's Exposition Center. A local church was pressed into service as a shelter to house hundreds more people.

City and county lawmen and emergency management officials had scrambled to help thousands of hurricane evacuees navigate their way northward after available shelter space in Lufkin and Angelina County filled in mere hours Thursday night.

In Nacogdoches to the north, Olga Reasons, with her four children and her mother, was weary from two days of attempted evacuation: They didn't know where they were when they arrived in town Friday morning.

It was their second attempt to evacuate the Beaumont-Port Arthur area. On Wednesday, they spent 7 1/2 hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic before calling it quits and turning around.

"We made it back to our house in about five minutes," Reasons said.

They showered and went to bed, but on Thursday Rita was still a Category 5 storm and moving closer.

The family got back in the car and started again.

The trip to Nacogdoches took 26 hours. And when the Reasons family arrived, all of the shelters were full. The family pulled up to the North Street Church of Christ, but officials said it was a special-needs facility for the elderly.

Olga couldn't stop the tears. "I know their needs are greater than ours," she said. "And I'm thankful that we are all together and we're all safe, but we're so tired. I had to pull over on the side of the road last night and I fell asleep. I woke up, and my [14-year-old] son said, 'Mom? Do you need me to drive for a while?' ... I had been asleep for two hours. A lot of people were on the side of the road sleeping.

Even though the church officially was full, firefighters there found a place for the family to rest before it continued north.

Another evacuee, Debra Akin, said the drive up U.S. 59 from Houston never before had taken so long.

Loaded up and on the road by 4 a.m. Thursday, Akin and her husband felt sure they would make her father's funeral visitation by 5 p.m. that afternoon in Nacogdoches. But by the time they arrived Friday morning, the funeral itself was halfway over.

Thirty hours on the road was no way to grieve, Akin said. The going had been painfully slow, she said – sometimes 10 mph, usually less.

The road north was littered with abandoned vehicles, slowing traffic further. Cars were running out of gas and overheating in the sun. Running the air conditioner was out of the question, Akin said, and the heat inside the car seemed to lengthen the trip and shorten tempers.

Hundreds of stranded motorists spent the night in their vehicles or camped out in parking lots, as the mass exodus from the Texas Gulf Coast became one of the largest traffic jams ever seen in East Texas.

Transportation officials late Thursday had turned major north-south arteries into northbound-only roadways in an effort to move the massive influx of evacuees' vehicles through Lufkin and Angelina County to destinations in the Dallas, Tyler and Longview areas that might have shelter space. By Friday afternoon, U.S. 59 traffic flow had returned to normal north-south lanes.

This article was compiled from reports by The Lufkin (Texas) Daily News and The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas.