There was a time when Nancy Schwartz would have waited a bit longer before deciding if she was going to evacuate before an approaching hurricane. Then came Katrina.
“Sure, I’d be sitting back a bit more and making sure for sure it was coming this way,” Schwartz said while she her boyfriend filled up their truck at a Kemah gas station just hours before a mandatory evacuation order was to take effect for the county. “We’ve lived through so many storms and we survived them.
“But this is different. They seem more violent these days.”
Schwartz and boyfriend Brian Fisher will spend the next several days at a place Fisher owns near Intercontinental Airport in Houston. For Fisher, there was never a second thought of whether to stay or go.
“We are so out of here,” said Fisher, who canceled a trip to prepare his Clear Lake Shores home for a possible visit by Rita. “We will get the house secure and hit the road before the evacuation (order takes effect).”
Melea Hammett is a clerk at the Murphy USA gas station where Fisher was filling up. She said traffic had been heavy since Monday night.
“It’s busy all day and night,” the League City resident said. “I don’t know if we will have enough gas for them all.”
What Hammett did know was that she wasn’t sticking around. As customers lined up to buy her gasoline, she was compiling a list of items she needed to load up once she got off work.
“I’ve got my list and then I am gone,” she said while holding up a pair of lists she wrote on the back of gas station receipts.”
Jimmy Jaramillo was ready to get out of town, just as soon as he got a hold of some plywood. He was among the hundreds in line at Kemah Hardware waiting for what the store owner said would be the last load of lumber his store would get until after the storm threat had passed.
The 55-year-old Seabrook resident said once his house was boarded up he would head north.
“No reason to stay if the hurricane is that big as they say,” said Jaramillo.
Mark Sandridge and his family were preparing to meet up with family in Tyler.
“My house is pretty much set up,” the Kemah resident said. “I have elderly parents, and their home is OK as well. We’ve been packing for about a day and ready to go.”
Texas City resident Henry Haney got to see first hand what havoc a storm can have on people’s lives. As the head of what was Texas City’s Red Cross shelter for Hurricane Katrina victims, Haney too was preparing to get out of town.
He said he picked up his elderly mother form her Galveston home on Tuesday and was ready to hit the road sometime Wednesday. First though, he had to take his wife for cancer treatments.
“In the past I may not have left, but with my wife, you can’t think that way anymore,” he said.
Elizabeth Taylor said she is taking no chances when it comes to Hurricane Rita. The Texas City resident evacuated on a bus to Lufkin with her two sons Wednesday and hoped her home would still be in one piece when she returns. Rita is not the first hurricane Taylor has experienced — she lived in Galveston during Hurricane Alicia and stayed through the storm. However, this time Taylor decided to evacuate because she lives close to the Texas City refineries.
“With all of the explosions lately and the fact that we are supposed to be on the bad side of the hurricane and there is a possibility of tornadoes we are leaving,” Taylor said. “We are just too close to the plants.”
Jerry Parson also decided to evacuate with his wife and 4-year-old son until after Hurricane Rita passes through. Parson boarded-up his home in La Marque and left town Wednesday for a hotel room in San Antonio.
“It was difficult to find a hotel,” he said. “We called around in Dallas, but they were all full. We were able to get a room in San Antonio. It is actually the same room we stayed in when we took a vacation to Sea World last month.”
Like Taylor, Parson has been through a hurricane before. His parents lived in Galveston and the family stayed during Alicia. Ever since that time Parson said he has evacuated for all sever storms.
“(Alicia) was scary,” said Parson. “It got real calm when the eye came over and then it got bad again. Ever since then I’ve been leaving. A tropical depression could be coming and I’m leaving.”
Although he is concerned about his home, Parson still managed to find humor in the situation.
“This is my wife’s first hurricane and she’s really packing-up,” Parson said. “She’s not fooling around. I got like one bag and she has like a thousand.”
