Texans flee low-lying areas as Ike turns toward Freeport
Galveston mayor urges citywide evacuation
Hurricane Ike's turn toward the Houston area spurred emergency officials today to call for a mandatory evacuation of residents in areas that will be subject to a massive storm surge.
Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas also expanded the evacuation order there to cover the entire island. In addition, Chambers County, which initially had ordered only the evacuation of low-lying businesses and homes, this morning ordered the entire county to evacuate by noon, and a voluntary evacuation has been called for in Liberty County.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett declared a state of disaster in the county and called for mandatory evacuations of low-lying areas, starting at noon today. Those residents are in evacuation zones A and B, specifically ZIP codes 77507, 77058, 77059, 77062, 77520, 77546, 77571, 77586 and 77598.
The total population of that territory is about 245,000 residents, county officials said, and about 13,000 have said they need help evacuating.
Emmett asked all other Harris County residents to prepare to shelter in place, saying residents whose homes could be inundated by storm surges needed time and room to get to safety.
``The winds will blow and they'll howl and we'll get a lot of rain, but if you lose power and need to leave, you can do that later,'' he said.
If the hurricane remains on its current track, Emmett said, a 15-foot storm surge could hit areas around Galveston Bay.
"We're not talking about gently rising water," he said. "We're talking about a surge that will come into your homes."
People who need assistance in evacuating should call 311. Those who already have registered for assistance by calling the previous 211 number do not need to re-register, officials said.
Ike's march through the Gulf of Mexico now appears headed toward Freeport, in Brazoria County, forcing mandatory evacuations in at least three counties south and east of Houston.
Thomas said the decision to evacuate came after watching Ike through the night.
``This has been a hard call to make,'' she said, ``But we are making this call to save lives.''
Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough said a move north by Ike led to the decision. ``When we saw that last movement, we thought, if it's going to make an error, it's going to come toward us,'' he said.
Ike's erratic behavior dramatically changed emergency plans in Galveston in less than a day. At noon Wednesday, Thomas said she did not expect to call for a mandatory evacuation, but asked residents on the island's low-lying western end to leave voluntarily.
By 5 p.m. Wednesday, that request had become mandatory and Thomas called for a voluntary evacuation of the eastern end of the island, the 10 miles protected by a 17-foot sea wall.
Residents who need assistance evacuating Galveston Island are urged to arrive at the Island Community Center, 4700 Broadway, by 2 p.m. today, the mayor's office announced.
Officials said 75 buses will take evacuees to shelters in Austin. Water will be provided on the buses.
The evacuees also include 355 patients -- 51 of them newborns -- from hospitals at Galveston's University of Texas Medical Branch.
Hospitals from as far away as Fort Worth and Arkansas loaned UTMB ambulances and specially trained nurses to help move the babies to hospitals in San Antonio and Austin, said Joan Richardson, UTMB's emergency preparedness officer.
The 27 newborns with the most serious problems, many of them in incubators or attached to breathing machines and other specialized equipment, were to be flown out in fixed-wing aircraft, Richardson said.
``They are the most fragile of patients and generally on respirators,'' she said.
In Harris County, Emmett said a decision on when to facilitate the evacuation by shifting the area's highways to exclusively outbound traffic will be made after this evening's rush hour.
His declaration of a state of disaster effectively gives him the authority to control evacuations and rescue efforts, as well as the closure of county facilities.
The declaration also is aimed at preventing local merchants from trying to take advantage of Hurricane Ike by increasing prices for emergency supplies.
Harris County Attorney Mike Stafford said the declaration allows his office to sue merchants or contractors who charge excessive fees. The state of disaster will remain in effect for seven days, unless extended by Commissioners Court.
Houston Mayor Bill White this morning urged all employers to give their employees the day off on Friday unless their presence is essential. He also called on all school districts that have not already suspended classes on Friday to do so.
Patients at the University of Texas Medical Branch were being prepared this morning for evacuation from Galveston Island, where a mandatory evacuation had been ordered earlier for only on the western end, and state aircraft began making a visual sweep of the Texas coastline to look at where more efforts could be made to remove residents from the area.
"The bottom line: It continues to move to the east and to the north, with impact along the Brazoria-Matagorda County line," said Walt Zaleski, meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Fort Worth office, late Wednesday. "That doesn't mean it will continue to do that."
But if it does, the Houston-Galveston area would be on what is considered the rougher, "dirty side" of a Category 4 hurricane, bringing with it storm surges of up to 20 feet in some areas.
At 10 a.m. today, the storm was 470 miles east-southeast of Galveston, moving at 10 mph on a west-northwesterly track, according to the National Weather Service. Maximum sustained winds were near 100 mph, with higher gusts.
Although it has not strengthened appreciably this morning, Ike has continued to grow in size. Hurricane-force winds were extending 115 miles outward from its center, the weather service reported, and tropical storm-force winds were extending 275 miles out.
"This is a big storm," Zaleski said.
Mandatory evacuations have been called for Brazoria County and areas south of Texas 35 and the Blessing area of Matagorda County.
Mayor White this morning urged residents to use today's good weather to clear their yards and patios of furniture, grills and other items that could become projectiles in hurricane-force winds.
They also should gather all the supplies they would need to ride out the storm if they haven't done so already, he said.
Even though it may appear that the storm's eye is heading toward landfall relatively far from here, Houston-area residents should take the storm seriously, White added.
"The exact location of where the eye crosses the coast may not be as important with a storm this size that has a storm surge this broad and winds this strong along the Texas coast," White said.
Harris County Commissioners Court held an emergency meeting at 10:30 a.m. today to discuss plans to shut down most county operations on Friday. Emmett does not have the authority to make that decision on his own.
Houston-area residents who live near bayous but are not in the ZIP codes under the mandatory evacuation order should use common sense in deciding whether to leave or shelter in place, White said.
"If (during) every storm that's come through here in the last 30 years their house has flooded, then when something is coming down like this, they ought to be thinking about what to do," White said. "But we do not have a mandatory evacuation area for everybody who lives along a particular bayou."
By late Wednesday afternoon, state and county officials, huddled together on a conference call, tried to make sense out of Ike's sudden 50-mile jump to the north and its widening cone. However, Jack Colley, chief of the Governor's Division of Emergency Management, assured city, county and state officials that no area along the coast would be without resources to get residents out.
''We're not going to chase Ike,'' he said. ''We're trying to position, reposition, reorganize."
Since Hurricane Rita in 2005, Colley's network of public officials and private business, particularly those from the grocery and fuel industries, has been tested with several smaller storms and emergencies. The strategy is simple: Once a hurricane or tropical storm is 120 hours away from Texas, a countdown clock begins.
Colley's team begins moving fuel and supplies to areas expected to be hit and then gradually pulling back and supplying the evacuation routes. The idea is that no one wants to see a repeat of the disastrous Hurricane Rita evacuation, in which it took too long to contraflow the highways — routing all traffic away from the storm — and too many Texans evacuated, choking the state's prized highway system and depleting all gas stations for days.
Ike is expected to be the biggest test for Texas since Rita. Despite being in a region already fatigued by the number of storm alerts and near misses, Ike's uncertain path has grabbed the attention of most residents in the Houston-Galveston area.
''I think, with each little ratchet up in our direction, people are going 'That's going to change things,' '' said Emmett.
Some residents debated whether to stay or go.
Bingo Cosby, owner of a surf shop in Surfside Beach, said Wednesday that he planned to ride out the blow. "I'm going to go upstairs above my shop with my two guns and protect my property," he said.
"Besides, the storm isn't coming here," he said confidently. "I went out on the jetty last night and prayed that it would just turn around."
But Darrin Hebert, who lives in Freeport and works for a sandblasting company, said he was getting out of town. "I've never left for a storm before," he said, "but I just got the feeling that this is going to be the bad one."
Hebert hitched a ride to Angleton, where people without their own transportation were boarding buses headed for shelters.
Rush on hurricane supplies
The number of people evacuating is expected to intensify today.
To ease any crush of traffic, the Texas Department of Transportation cleared debris and opened extra lanes for traffic heading away from the coast.
In the event Ike gets mean, 7,500 National Guard troops have been activated and are moving into position, and 1,350 passenger buses are standing by to help evacuations.
Gov. Rick Perry ordered state agencies to continue to gear up for the storm and advised citizens to stay alert.
A rush on hurricane supplies was reported at several coastal-area stores, as shoppers stocked up on batteries, bottled water and plywood to cover windows.
"A lot of people are getting edgy," said Javier Moreno, an assistant store manager at a Home Depot in Corpus Christi.
As trucks pulled in with more wood, passengers were lined up waiting for it, he said.
Nueces County Judge Loyd Neal said there would be no mandatory evacuation, but people should take steps to ensure their safety.
"If you want to get out of harm's way, do it now," Neal said.
Residents were told they would be on their own during the hurricane and neither the Red Cross nor the government would be operating shelters before the storm.
Hundreds leave Corpus
Buses to San Antonio were provided free of charge to all those who could not make it out of town on their own.
Manuel Castellanos, 48, and his girlfriend Grace Garcia, 43, were among the hundreds of Corpus Christi residents who gathered at a downtown senior citizens center to board evacuation buses.
Clutching a white stuffed bear, Castellanos said he and Garcia decided to flee their low-lying home on the city's South Side because "there's no telling what may happen. I don't want to take no chances."
In Chambers County, officials ordered residents to evacuate the flood-prone areas bordering Galveston and Trinity Bay.
"We are expecting a possible 4-foot to 8-foot storm surge that could put some areas underwater," said Ryan Holzaepfel, who heads the county's emergency management.
Contributing to this report were the Associated Press and Chronicle staff writers Dane Schiller in Houston, Richard Stewart in Brazoria County, Cindy Horswell in Chambers County, Rick Dunham in Washington and San Antonio Express-News writer Lisa Sandberg in Corpus Christi.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5993388.html
)
