Year: 2005

Douglas Adams was right.

That being said, some areas do need to prepare to evacuate, but these are mainly on the east side of town or south of the beltway (as well as areas that are prone to flooding, like near Braes Bayou, Buffalo Bayou, Sims Bayou, and White Oak Bayou):

Houston/Galveston Evacuation Zones (PDF, 762kb) from the TxDPS Division of Emergency Management

Galveston County detail (PDF, 1.7Mb)

Harris County detail (PDF, 2.8Mb)

Evacuation Routes (PDF, 2.9Mb)

Prepare for Evacuation (PDF, 446kb) (make and take your computer backup with you, or take your hard drive)

KHOU has some very good maps up of the current track of Rita, the computer models, and historical tracks of major storms that have been in the same vicinity at this time in years past.

For those who will be staying put, fill your bathtubs to use as a source of drinking water. You can also drink the water in the toilet reservoir. Get canned food and a manual can opener. Working flashlight and batteries that fit it (and maybe a spare bulb). Refill your prescriptions. Fill up your gas tank. Be smart!

Hurrican Survial Kit from the Weather Research Center.

Again, don’t panic. This is not going to be another New Orleans: Katrina passed just by a city built in a bowl-shaped depression that is near or below sea level; Rita will most likely pass a hundred or more miles west of a city on a sloping plain that averages almost 50 ft above sea level. Houston is not surrounded by levees holding back a river on one side and a lake on the other.

As the detail maps show, the projected effect from a Category 5 storm surge (which is the biggest destroyer of life and property) won’t make it inside the loop. Wind damage and flooding will be widespread, but mainly in a swath 100 miles either side of the eye of the storm. Most models are predicting landfall at Matagorda Bay or south. I’m betting that it hits closer to Corpus Cristi.

What Houstonians Should Know About Hurricanes by Jill F. Hasling, Certified Consulting Meteorologist, Weather Research Center

If, by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you,
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good or talk too wise:

If you can dream and not make dreams your master;
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear the words you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a man, my son!

Come see Jekyll & Hyde at the Hobby Center, this weekend and next. If shows are cancelled due to Hurricane Rita, I’ll have a party over at my house…built in 1930, bone dry during Allison, gas stove and looking to score a generator tomorrow.