Galveston County residents who evacuated to the Dallas-Fort Worth area woke up Saturday to the news they had hoped to hear: Hurricane Rita had spared their cities from major damage.
With that concern out of the way, people turned their attention to their next challenge: How to avoid major traffic going back home.
While some decided to stay put at their hotels for a couple of days, others drove from gas station to gas station until they managed to fill up their tanks.
“We could have stayed one more night here, but we’re leaving now,” Donnie Barajaz of Dickinson said shortly after 1 p.m. “We’ve got a full tank and five canisters with five gallons each. We restocked water and sandwiches. Hopefully, we’ll get back safe.”
Barajaz said his 12-member family, traveling in four vehicles, would stay together and, once again, take back roads.
Staying here until early Sunday but also taking alternative routes instead of highways will be Friendswood resident Janice Gomez.
“My home is on my mind,” she said. “I’m going to have a home when I go back.”
Meanwhile, Mike and Sandra Howren of League City, their two daughters, their dog Ty, their 65-year-old next door-neighbor and Charles Dodds, a friend from Kemah, said they planned to take advantage of their hotel reservations through Tuesday.
Unlike some evacuees who spent up to a day and a half sitting in traffic in unbearable heat, their 18-hour trip wasn’t plagued with the kind of horror stories that have become the dominant topic at hotel lobbies. But even so, they’re taking no chances as they map out their return.
“One thing I would have gotten was two-way radios for car-to-car communication,” Mike Howren said. “We’re going to try to buy those radios today.”
Walking her dog at the same hotel where Howren was staying, Brenda Featherly of Texas City said she would prefer to stay another night if she could but that was not an option. Monday morning, she explained, she needs to be back at work.
Still worried that she might encounter clogged roads Sunday, Featherly said — her eyes turning red — she was nevertheless happy to know she’d soon reunite with her husband.
“He’s doing fine, and he said there’s only one downed tree in our yard — and it’s a small tree,” she said.
Featherly’s husband, a BP employee who’s on the fire team, stayed behind as his family left for DeRidder in Louisiana, only to find upon getting there 24 hours later that the area could also be in harm’s way.
“We kind of felt like the storm was following us,” Featherly said. “They were asking people to leave, so we came here and had no clue where we’d be staying. Our plan was just to get away from the storm. The gas shortage was the fear of everybody, and on our way home, that’s still our fear.”
