The Effects of Hurricane Gustav on a Small Texas Town

Woodville, Texas, is a sleepy little town of 2,700 that sits on a cross point of highways. We're 50 miles from Beaumont Texas and 50 miles from the Louisiana coast. Because of the highways that run through our town, we are a first stop for evacuees. During Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, our little town held several thousand evacuees from all over the area. Unfortunately, the eye wall of Rita passed almost 20 miles to the east of us, wreaking havoc all over our county.

Fast forward to 2008 and the beginnings of the Gustav evacuation. Hurricane Gustav had just crossed off the Cuban coast and emergency management officials were planning evacuations all over the Gulf Coast. New Orleans evacuated all their special needs people yesterday the 30^th. Beaumont Texas begins a mandatory evacuation today at 6:00 am. All four lanes of our highway are converted into a evacuation lane.

I work as an IT professional for the emergency management office in our County and although I'm not directly involved in the process I do get to hear a lot of the concerns and planning going on. I can see that we have learned a lot from Rita and Katrina and the supplies are in place. I don't think we could sustain a direct hit like with Rita but we are definitely better prepared than with Rita. We aren't hosting shelters this time as a lot of people that had evacuated here were in for a very rough time during Rita.

Early Saturday morning, Jefferson, along with Orange, and Hardin Counties, ordered a mandatory evacuation. All that day we had a pretty steady line of traffic going through. We never had to make our four lane highway into a contra flow as everyone made it out with plenty of time. At Emergency Management I learned that the official plan for Texas was to wait and see if Gustav made landfall in Louisiana. As soon as the eye wall made impact they were to reverse the evacuations getting everyone back south as fast as possible. The aim was to get people out of the North (which they felt was where the hurricane was heading) and to make room for Louisiana people.

About 10:00 am this morning a new wrinkle emerged as we found out that several of the gas stations aren't getting anymore gas. This may lead to a huge problem as people from the coastal counties and the counties east of us start to evacuate. They may not have any gas when they get here. The word from our emergency management team is that we are to expect lots of evacuees from Louisiana coming through our area. We are encouraging people to go further west or north for lodging and safety. The official word is that we are expecting at least 5" of rain if not more and in places like Jasper or Newton counties they may see as much 20" inches of rain. Texas is gearing up to try and help people from Louisiana. We sent air and ground support from the national guard to help evacuate the critically ill.

Around 2:00 pm I was at the EOC (emergency operation center) nailing down a problem, after I finished the job I went to alert the head of the EOC and he was talking with Jim Mc Reynolds our state Representative. I listened as he was checking with the head of our emergency management office. He is driving around the East Texas checking out the infrastructure and the people involved in these evacuations. He left heading north to check on the rest of the county agencies.

Some time Sunday Newton and Jasper counties ordered a mandatory evacuation of it's citizens as they are closest to the Louisiana border. Most of Sunday was spent by people driving north and west to get out of the way.

By Monday afternoon the streets of our town where empty. The wind started blowing a little and we relocated to our church which was a larger brick structure. Our local Wal-Mart closed and so did several of our fast food stores. They ran out of supplies and manpower more than anything. Luckily our gas supplies held in place. Fortunately Gustav weakened and his impact on Louisiana was not catastrophic. By Tuesday afternoon the highways where full of people heading home. We had traffic jams going back but I think most people were happy to have a home to go back to.