Gas shortage makes evacuating difficult
Some highlights:
GALVESTON, Texas – Hundreds of thousands of people across the Houston metropolitan area struggled to make their way inland in a bumper-to-bumper exodus Thursday as Hurricane Rita closed in on the nation’s fourth-largest city with winds howling at 150 mph.
Drivers ran out of gas in 14-hour traffic jams or looked in vain for a place to stay as hotels hundreds of miles away filled up.
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“Don’t follow the example of Katrina and wait. No one will come and get you during the storm,” Harris County Judge Robert Eckels said in Houston.
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Highways leading inland out of Houston, a metropolitan area of 4 million people, were clogged up to 100 miles north of the city. Service stations reported running out of gasoline, and police officers carried gas to motorists who ran out.
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Tow trucks tried to wend their way along the shoulders, pulling stalled cars out of the way.
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“Jackie Thomason waits anxiously in line for fuel at one of the few open gas stations in Pasadena, Texas, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005. Thomason and her husband are evacuating the Houston area prior to Hurricane Rita arriving. Thomason said she was scared without fuel they would not be able to evacuate. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)”
Dear Commander Zero:
OK, so obviously we avoid problems associated with gas shortages by stocking up on fuel in advance, but I’m still consternated about how to Get out of Dodge when everyone else within 50 square miles is trying to do the same thing. I know you prefer to hunker in your bunker, but here where we are, a tsunami warning or a quake is generally going to mean I am safest somewhere far away from our well-stocked but still not terribly disaster-proof apartment. What wisdom can the Commander dispense about effective evacuation?
Love all these people who wait until the last minute.
I filled the tank in the Colt yesterday (the last time it was filled was April!), and I’ll fill up the truck today. Gas prices will jump again over the weekend when Rita finally decides where to hit, just based on bad news in general in the futures market, so now’s the time to get those tanks/cans filled.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
You didn’t ask me, but my answer is:
DIRT BIKES!! VROOOM VROOOOOM!!!!!!!!! Excellent gas mileage, will go almost anywhere! As long as the cops don’t catch you.
You can’t carry much with you, though. For that, a quad would be a little better.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
The best way for a hurricane is to keep up with the Hurricane Center forecasts and schedule your out-of-town trip early if your area begins to look like a possibility. I’ll bet even the back roads out of Houston are clogged now. Which brings up another point – Know Your Back Roads…
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
Well, I think that for the disasters that you have some advance warning of…like hurricanes….you try to ‘get while the gettins good’. Meaning you dont wait to the last minute. If its Tuesday and they say its going to hit Friday, then you leave Tuesday.
Something to think about, how is everyone getting the hell out of Dodge? The answer: in their Dodge. Or Ford. Or Chrysler.
What would be the non-autmobile way to go? Would that be feasible? If you need to go, say ten or twenty miles you might make a heck of a lot better time on a mountain bike or motorcycle. Or, if youve got the bucks, maybe the airport. In the atrocious movie ‘Deep Impact’ a family trying to evacuate is tied up in freeway gridlock. Their son, on his little enduro motorbike, weaves in and out of truck, up onto the shoulder and out of danger. Interesting thinking.
It’d be nice, obviously, to have a nice chunk of your supplies elsewhere. If you had a friend out in the sticks or in another city you could leave a footlocker with them with the essentials (clothes, batteries, water purifier, stable food, sleeping bag, ammo, etc).
For the disaster you cant make an appointment for, like an earthquake, youre going to probably be better of staying put with your gear (if youre at home) or, if you think you can make it, heading home from work with your 3-day pack. Leaving town after an earthquake might be tricky and I’d do it only if I were certain I knew that where I was going was a beter place and if I was certain that the way there was navigable. (And, again, for that something like dirt bike or mountain bike may have some advantages [and disadvantages] over a car or truck.)
For a tsunami, where I would think theyd give you an hours worth of notice, at least, I would think you are almost guaranteed to not get out if your going to drive the Camry.
Maybe you should think about what problems you forsee having to evacuate over and then plotting three different routes to get you out…keeping in mind some of the non-traditional avenues like crossing golf courses, right-of-ways and that sort of thing.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
Ragnar Benson, despite the huge amount of crap and useless info in his books, does occasionally give a nugget of info. Fromt “Survival Retreat”:
Have at least three different routes to your retreat area and actually drive them to determine chokepoints and weak spots
Be able to drive whatever vehicle will be at hand be it car, motorcycle, speedboat or schoolbus
Keep an eye on ‘trigger events’ to let you know when to leave and stick to that plan.
Natural selection in action.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
It’d be nice, obviously, to have a nice chunk of your supplies elsewhere. If you had a friend out in the sticks or in another city you could leave a footlocker with them with the essentials (clothes, batteries, water purifier, stable food, sleeping bag, ammo, etc).
Oooo, good point. We’ve also talked about getting a house in the middle of nowhere (WV, most likely) so that we can ride our dirt bikes (VRROOOOM!!) but have a place of our own to stay in. If we did that, we could maintain supplies there as well as at home and not have to worry about carrying much with us.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
If we did that, we could maintain supplies there as well as at home and not have to worry about carrying much with us.
Preicisely
The trick is to have enough so you can weather things at home, but if for some reason you have to flee home with just whats on your back you can re-equip to a sense of near-normalcy at your secondary location.
And a nice, quiet ‘weekend house’ in WV, with a hidden closet or under-the-porch cache of goodies might be just the thing to keep you out of whatever Guantanadome the-powers-that-be say you should go to.
I have a friend on my watchlist who lives in Houston. She posted an entry to her journal a couple of days ago saying she was going to wait until later to fill up her gas cans. I commented and told her to do it right away, and to keep her cars topped off too, because everyone else would be waiting too. A couple of people responded to my comment disagreeing with me, but she decided to get her gas right away.
Now she and her husband have full tanks of gas in their cars, plus gallons of extra gasoline.
They’re going to hunker down and wait it out, though. They’re in a good place (high ground), have a backup generator (for running their fridge and freezer) and lots of food and water. Plus they can always leave after the storm is gone, if they want, since they have gasoline.
Gas stations around here and in Charlotte are already out of multiple grades of gas again. Needless to say, the wife & I filled up both our cars today. I still have the reserve from before too.
Route recon pays dividends
I’t just kills me that people don’t plan, especially with some forewarning. They’re just…I dunno…waiting to be victims.
Obviously none in the above image planned ahead—or they wouldn’t be there. Just observing traffic on major road corridors during rush hour should provide enough evidence that roads are going to be unnavigable in an emergency—maybe with 4×4 so you could pull off and ride the shoulder until you hit the next chokepoint (like a bridge, intersection). Route recon pays dividends.
Allot of cosmopolitans from the D.C. and Northern VA come to WV for the weekend. Sunday evening, Route 70 is thick with cars. These are people on vacation, I imagine R70 will be refugee axis #1 if something happens in their neighborhood.
Planning. PACE: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. Commo, driving, food, caches…everything. PACE suffuses nearly all of my preparedness thoughts.
With the problems in the coastal gulf areas, a seemingly random event like another northeast blackout could amplify into a national crisis. Maybe during the next flu season.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
I realized last night that as long as trains were running, I could exit down town and be dropped off pretty much at the end of my street by hopping a freight train. They have to cross grade crossings and hit the top of a grade to get past my house, so it’s not too bad to hop on and off if I’m stuck on no other easy way to exit down town Atlanta. Past one yard, Left on the spur line, right at the reversing-Y and to the top of the grade.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
A self storage unit with security and 24hr access would also work for this type of situation…
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
keeping in mind some of the non-traditional avenues like crossing golf courses, right-of-ways and that sort of thing.
The satellite views from Google Maps might be handy for that kind of planning.
Yes but…….
Theres two schools of thought on that one. One says its a good idea but another says that, even in non crisis times when law enforcement isnt hopelessly overwhelmed , storage units are broken into with some frequency. Someone did mention that storing old ratty furniture, like a sofa or two, inside the storage unit and hiding your gear inside the sofa might be the way to go.
Re: Route recon pays dividends
“There are no victims, only volunteers.”
Yeah, I use the PACE system too.
Re: Dear Commander Zero:
Seriously, a KLR650, with a 7 gallon adventure tank and 5 gal external, can take you a long way…
atek3
Part of the moral here is – don’t wait for the mandatory evacs. Be ready & willing to bug out a day early and spend the money on a hotel and/or “impose” on understanding friends… Fortunately, I have bug out destinations both north & south, and someone I could count on should west be necessary. (East, and I have to have a lot of friends in the USN to hop a ride on a BGB.)
I’ve told more folks about the basics of planning w/the condensed situation you presented a while back, “You’re cold, wet & naked in the middle of your living room, with no power or water. What do you need and what order do you need it in?” It really brings things into sharp perspective.
Note to self: Keep preparing, you’re nowhere near where you need to be…
I had to by Kroger last night for some groceries and water and found the bottled water aisle completely empty. Went across the street to a Walgreens, and they had stacks of 15-count cases of 16.9oz bottles, 3/$10, so I picked up six of those. The lines at gas stations were insane last night, some stations were already out of gas by 2030, and this morning on the way in to work, about half the stations I drove by were out. And this is 200+ miles away from Houston in north Texas.
You people must be panicky sorts up there. In Atlanta too. Here in Orlando, the prices have, if anything, dropped, and nobody’s out of anything.
You should see these people when the weatherman threatens 0.1″ of snow. It’s a madhouse.