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Showing posts from October, 2005

Running from Rita

In pictures, our bad luck in evacuating (photos of where we abandoned the cars, and a hint of our harrowing 36 hour journey) and our great fortune in very little damage from a major hurricane... We left as we were supposed to. To carry out our entire family, pets included, it took both cars. So yes, we had two cars on the road. But that's not where the real fault in the horrible evacuation lay. It lay in too many towns evacuating---officials telling people to evacuate who didn't need to. It lay in not having a well-established evacuation route that could handle the number of cars that would evacuate, especially after Katrina. And mainly, it lay in not opening the highways for contraflow BEFORE the evacuation. Not to mention closed stores, closed or empty gas stations, and not enough supplies. In record heat, we parked on major highways, inhaling exhaust and sweltering from heat, moving maybe a foot an hour. The baby got very sick, but recuperated quickly once we got medical att