Waiting for Rita

There's a hurricane coming, one that's going to hammer Texas so hard it'll make Katrina look like a gentle spring shower. Yesterday, Rita was moving between Florida and Cuba as a tropical storm. Today she's a Category 5 monster, just nine points away from the lowest pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Sustained winds of 175 miles per hour. Already she's the third most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, Gulf or Caribbean. I'm convinced that by this time tomorrow, she'll be the largest ever recorded.



The good news, at least for me, is that her projected path has shifted north ever-so-slightly. A few days ago, Corpus Christi and Matagorda Bay were ground zero, which meant that Port Aransas would've been wiped out and by Saturday afternoon, San Antonio (and New Braunfels) would be pounded by 100-mile-per-hour winds and 12 inches or more of rain. Now it looks like we'll be on the southwest side of the storm, and likely be spared the worst of the wind and the rain. Galveston, though, appears doomed in every sense of the word. What the Great Storm of 1900 didn't destroy, Rita probably will. The predicted storm surge of 20-plus feet will breach the seawall and innundate the island. The Bishop's Palace, which survived the 1900 storm, might not make it this time. Consider this: Since that great storm, Galveston was raised 8 feet and the seawall constructed to protect it from future hurricanes. Rita is so much bigger than the storm from a century ago that these defenses will be overwhelmed. And the 1900 storm is considered the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history.

My grandmother lives in Cuero, right in the storm's path, maybe 50 miles from the coast. My mother leaving Columbus to get her tomorrow, then come here to weather the storm. Both Columbus and Cuero are expected to be pounded by hurricane-force winds and flooding rain. Some more relatives, just north of Houston in Spring, are debating whether to come here or not. One is a retiree from Germany who has never experienced a hurricane before, and is dismissing the evacuation plans as hysteria. I remember how tropical storm Allison utterly flooded Houston back in 2001, and how the relatively minor Hurricane Alicia blew out every window in Houston back in '83 and shut the city down for the better part of a week. Alicia's winds picked up gravel from rooftops and sent it flying through the streets like buckshot. No word yet on what my sister in College Station is planning on doing. College Station is right in the storm's path, and expected to feel the full force of the hurricane. But it's pretty far inland, so Rita will have weakened somewhat. A lot of people from Houston are evacuating to Aggieland.

My mom called a little while ago. Interstate 10 runs between San Antonio and Houston, and Columbusis not quite half way between the two. She reported that the traffic was bumper-to-bumper on the highway, barely inching along. The good news, obviously, is that people from Houston are taking the threat seriously and getting out ahead of the storm. The bad news is that anyone not already on the move might not be able to flee on Thursday or Friday because of the gridlock. Five million people trying to leave the city via three roads--I-10, I-45 and Highway 6--can't help but create the world's largest bottleneck.

Today's temperatures were close to 100 degrees, with crystal blue skies and only the occasional wisp of a cloud. Hard to imagine what's looming over the horizon.

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