Watch out for rest of season
BY PHIL REYNOLDS SOUTH JETTY REPORTER Watch

Remember where you were on Sept. 4, 2005?

If you were like several other Port Aransans, you were at the civic center, providing food, care and comfort to evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina hit the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29, 2005, causing an estimated $81.2 billion in damage and becoming the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. While the storm surge was catastrophic in Mississippi and along the Louisiana coast west of New Orleans, it was in the Big Easy itself where Katrina was felt the hardest. The storm breached levees separating the city from Lake Ponchartain, leading to flooding of 80 percent of New Orleans and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless.

Evacuees spread in every available direction, with 55 people eventually ending up in Port Aransas via Corpus Christi. They were met at the civic center with a hastily-assembled group of volunteers, headed by the Rev. Richard Safford, appointed by Mayor Georgia Neblett to head the effort.

It got our attention.

When Hurricane Rita threatened less than three weeks later, reports of the devastation were still on people's minds. Rita pushed into the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 21 and by the following day appeared to be headed directly for the Texas Coastal Bend, with barometric pressures even lower than Katrina's (barometric pressure is one of the measures of the strength of a hurricane; the lower the pressure, generally, the stronger the storm).

By Tuesday, Sept. 20, city crews had plywood over windows on city buildings and residents were stocking up on batteries, candles, bottled water and other emergency supplies. Port Aransas ISD had closed schools for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Sept. 21-23.

Of those Katrina evacuees who came to Port Aransas, only one family was left in town, although 15 of that group were still being housed in Ingleside. Plans had been made to load them once again on a plane and fly them out of a storm's path - this time to Nebraska, state emergency officials said.

Neblett urged RV owners and those who would be pulling boat trailers

- both types vulnerable to winds - to leave early.

' out for

"RV owners can't wait to get off the island," she said. "If just two of those things turn over in 45 milean hour winds on evacuation routes,

'

we're all here. We have no way off

the island." rest of season

In theory, an evacuation would be done in timed waves, with areas closest to the coast being evacuated first. That would give those residents time to clear out of the most dangerous areas, planners reasoned.

That might have worked, except that San Patricio County jumped the gun and ordered residents to evacuate before Port Aransans did.

As it turned out, early in the morning of Sept. 23, Rita began a turn northward and everybody on Mustang Island heaved a sigh of relief.

That was last year.

This year, the first half of the hurricane season - officially June 1-Nov. 30 - was relatively quiet. The first hurricane wasn't forecast into the Gulf of Mexico until Ernesto, which appeared late last week.

However, the National Hurricane Center in Miami had already cautioned that this season, forecast to be fierce, wasn't over yet, and they predicted that the second half of the season would be worse than the first.

By Tuesday, Aug. 29, Ernesto had crossed Cuba and turned northward toward Florida. Forecasters were predicting that it would sweep up the Florida peninsula and back into the Atlantic Ocean, moving up the U.S. east coast.

Nevertheless, it got our attention.

Emergency planners, alarmed by the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans and by gridlocked highways in

Texas as residents tried to flee ahead of Rita, have been working in closer partnerships all year. season

"We've formed a solid bond," City Manager Michael Kovacs said of the relationship between Port Aransas and Corpus Christi. It's to the Corpus Christi emergency operations headquarters that local officials will go in case of an evacuation.

While a few voices last year criticized the Rita evacuation order as "crying wolf," others pointed to lessons learned from the exercise.

One who doesn't think the whole thing was a waste of time is Johnny Roberts, who sat out Hurricane Celia in Port Aransas in 1970.

"They have a different situation now than we had back (in 1970). There's a lot more people," Roberts said. "Some of them have been (evacuated) under circumstances that they thought were approaching a false alarm. Well ... they should rejoice that it was a false alarm."

Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, puts it a little differently.

"Preparation through education is less costly than learning through tragedy," Mayfield said.