The Crawl-Away Scrape: Houston to Austin in Eleven Hours
I got a report earlier this morning from a family member that the 150 mile trip from Houston to Austin now takes ten hours. The Houston Chronicle website says the travel time is eleven hours.
When Santa Anna took the Alamo, Texas settlers between San Antonio and Harrisburg fled east. This great bug-out became known as “The Runaway Scrape.” I’ve always thought that would be a great name for a jazz band– perhaps some day I’ll use it. The Galveston-Houston evacuation is far less chaotic than the Runaway Scrape, though listening to Houston talk radio shows (such as KTRH, 740 AM) demonstrates that nerves are fried. As the traffic creeps along tempers flare. Several motorists say they’re running out of gasoline.
Perhaps this Texas evacuation should be called “The Crawl-Away Scrape.” “Stop and Go Scrape” works, too.
The Chronicle’s lede:
Sixteen hours to San Antonio and Dallas. Eleven hours to Austin. With over a million people trying to flee vulnerable parts of the Houston area, Hurricane Rita has already become a nightmare even for those who left last night.
Traffic is only occasionally moving on freeways, and on Interstate 45, the main route, the drive just from Friendswood to Conroe was taking up to 13 hours.
Hoping to speed the evacuation ahead of Hurricane Rita’s arrival, authorities decided to open the incoming lanes of two Houston freeways to outbound traffic for the first time ever. Plans to reverse the traffic flow U.S. 290 were abandoned because of traffic problems it would create in Brenham and Giddings.
When all lanes of I-45 became outbound lanes north of Conroe early this afternoon, traffic immediately sped up.
Remember, the Interstate Highways are also Civil Defense highways– at least that’s how they were sold as super-federal highways after WWII. In the event of an enemy air attack on US cities, the highways would be used as evacuation routes. Planners pointed out that running all traffic in one direction automatically doubled capacity. In WWII the Germans used this “one way traffic” trick on their autobahns to move military units back and forth between the Eastern and Western Fronts.
Here are a couple of roadside vignettes from the Houston Chronicle:
With traffic at a dead halt on some highways, fathers and sons got out of their cars and played catch on freeway medians. Others stood next to their cars, videotaping the scene, or walked between vehicles, chatting with people along the way. Tow trucks tried to wend their way along the shoulders, pulling stalled cars out of the way.
It took Tiffany Heikkila 11 hours to drive with her 5-year-old son from Sugar Land to Austin. She left at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and saw packed hotel parking lots and gas station lines backed up all the way to the exit ramps.
“All along the way, cars were pulled off on the shoulder with drivers sleeping. They had their doors open with one foot hanging out of the car..”
Here’s a link to a short essay on The Runaway Scrape.
The Texas Handbook On-Line has a decent account. It includes this graf:
The flight was marked by lack of preparation and by panic caused by fear both of the Mexican Army and of the Indians. The people used any means of transportation or none at all. Added to the discomforts of travel were all kinds of diseases, intensified by cold, rain, and hunger. Many persons died and were buried where they fell. The flight continued until news came of the victory in the battle of San Jacinto. At first no credence was put in this news because so many false rumors had been circulated, but gradually the refugees began to reverse their steps and turn back toward home, many toward homes that no longer existed.
Two waves of evacuees left the Houston-Galveston area. The smart ones left Wednesday. Even then it was six hours to Austin. The rest left Thursday.
Comment by Mark L — 9/22/2005 @ 6:36 pm
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Pingback by Donklephant » Blog Archive » Houston Flees Hurricane Rita — 9/23/2005 @ 2:34 am
My grandfather evacuated from Clear Lake on Wednesday. He said the traffic up from Galveston was slowed by everyone hauling their expensive toys: boats and rv’s. My uncle in Friendswood packed up in 3 cars. Are the planners factoring in that when a household evacuates that in many cases it means everyone of age has their vehicle on the road?
Comment by Casey — 9/23/2005 @ 9:58 am
[…] the more immediate challenges. For some thoughts on the snarled traffic, see this post on the Crawl-Away Scrape. DEM’s key points as of this morning: Texas Division of Emergency Management’s m […]
Pingback by Austin Bay Blog » Rita Preparation Update from the Texas Division of Emergency Management — 9/23/2005 @ 12:09 pm
Why is it taking so long? Well, try this math problem: If 100,000 cars, averaging 20 feet in length are stopped bumper to bumper on four lanes, how long does the traffic jam stretch? Answer: A half-million feet, or 94.7 miles. In other words, the distance from Houston to College Station, the home of Texas A&M. The Houston metropolitan area contains more than 5 million people. To keep the math simple, let’s just assume that there are 1 million cars departing coastal Texas for points west. One million cars, on four lanes stretches 1,000 miles. Bumper to bumper on one lane, and those same cars will form a traffic jam greater in length than the distance from Houston, Texas to Juneau, Alaska.
Comment by Bob K — 9/23/2005 @ 2:44 pm
I was lucky that I lived in northwest Houston. I got to Dallas in 10.5 hours. People needed to plan better routes. I went from 249 to 2920 to 290 to hw 6 to I35 to Dallas. Once I got to HW-6, it was really crusing, getting up to 80mph at some points, and 35 had no slow traffic at all. 45 was not the way to get to Dallas, and I-10 was not the way to get to San Antonio nor Austin.
Comment by Chris — 9/23/2005 @ 3:26 pm
What’s amazing to me is the amount of criticism that is being hurled against the local and state agencies by the morons in the press. Why this, and why that, cars are out of gas on the side of the road, etc.,etc. The press fails to look at fact: THIS IS THE BIGGEST EVACUATION EVER. People are leaving dangerous areas, and yes there are inconveniencies, and yes, if the tax payers are willing to fork over the money, they could have 12 lane wide evacuation routes, and have 2000 state owned tanker trucks with 15 million gallons of fuel standing by 24/7/365. But at the end of the day, people were just inconvenienced, they were warned, and they got out, and damn the luck they had to sit in traffic for 20 hours. Yes, people got stuck on the side of the road, and had to be towed, or moved, or refueled, put in perspective, this is was still 48-24 hr BEFORE the storm hit, most of these people have ALREADY been moved out of the way, and by the time the storm makes land fall, they will be off the road and safely inland, this has been the most successful evacuation ever in terms of size and time. And yet the press feels justified in criticizing the people and agencies who just made it happen. Un-freaken believable.
Comment by John — 9/23/2005 @ 8:57 pm
Chris, if you lived in NW Houston, you were luckier than you knew. YOU did not need to evacuate. What is the danger in a hurricane? Rising water. Wind within 10 miles of the coast, but mainly rising water. Guess what? NW Houston DOES NOT FLOOD. No danger from that. Wind? Well, its like this — the inland danger from hurricanes is tornadoes, and your chances of getting hit by a hurricane-spawned tornado is just as good in Dallas as it would be at your own home. This puppy is going to spawn tornadoes all the way through Arkansas. In 1983 Palestine, TX (180 miles inland) got plastered worse by tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Alicia than Friendswood, Texas (in the evac zone). You burned a lot of gasoline, and wasted a lot of your own time — to say nothing of taking up space on highways that people in the evacuation zone needed — to run to a place that is just as dangerous as the one you left. Congrats!!!
Comment by Mark L — 9/23/2005 @ 9:38 pm
Houston’s Evacuation Plans While awaiting any significant rain from Hurricane Rita (we’ve had some gusty winds throughout the evening), I found this perceptive analysis of the well-publicized traffic jams emanating from Houston (from Austin Bay’s blog): Why is it taking so lon…
Trackback by The Bernoulli Effect — 9/24/2005 @ 12:30 am
PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. At the swap meet, I ate lunch with a trader whose military buddies had extensive experience with disaster management. He was impressed with the way something like 2 1/2 million people evacuated south Texas and western Louisiana. We were hard presse…
Trackback by Cold Spring Shops — 9/25/2005 @ 12:15 am
tx… Austinbay blogged about houston tx….
Trackback by the houston blog — 5/29/2006 @ 5:25 am