'It Was Like the End of the World,' One Texan Says

HOUSTON, Sept. 23 -- With Rita closing in, the family of Albert Ruben Sr. drove here this morning to a high school basketball auditorium turned hurricane shelter of last resort -- after taking the most maddening journey of their lives.

In a caravan of 20 cars, the Ruben family and their neighbors in the coastal town of Texas City had tried to obey the state's mandatory hurricane evacuation order. With full gas tanks, food and water, they left on a designated evacuation highway on Wednesday at 11:30 p.m., hoping to beat the rush and avoid the heat.

Seventeen hours later, they had traveled just 60 miles and were stuck in traffic. They had driven most of that time -- in daytime temperatures of about 100 degrees -- without air conditioning to save fuel. All public services along the evacuation route -- for gasoline, food, water, bathrooms -- were closed.

Ruben, 50, a juvenile-detention officer in Galveston County, said he saw three ambulances carry away elderly people who had collapsed in the heat of their unmoving cars. His grandchildren, 4 and 7, had put on baby diapers to avoid soiling the car.

"It was like the end of the world," Ruben said. "You know what it makes you want to do? It makes you want to go home and die. The government done us wrong."

Ruben and most of his family gave up on the evacuation by Thursday afternoon and drove back home to Texas City for the night, having wasted most of their gas. Other family members, including his wife's mother, decided to soldier on in the traffic and head north. Ruben said he has not heard from them and does not know where they are.

On Friday morning, of course, Rita was still coming and the Ruben family had to do something.

Ten members of the family got back in their cars -- taking along the sandwiches they had not eaten on their earlier drive to nowhere -- and went to Milby High School in southeastern Houston. Ruben's daughter, Anitra Esther, a nurse, had been on the phone with the police and had been told that the high school would be a shelter.

They arrived around 8 a.m. Friday at the high school. Police standing out front told them it was full and suggested that they drive to a nearby high school basketball auditorium called Barnett Field House. (Police at Milby later told a reporter that the plan for a shelter at the school was canceled because the school has a tendency to flood in heavy rains.) When the Ruben family found the field house, which seats 3,200 for basketball game, it was just opening as a shelter. It offered bathrooms and water but no food, diapers or medicine.

Houston Mayor Bill White made it clear in repeated interviews this week that he did not want city residents to look to city shelters as a primary option for riding out the hurricane. The much-publicized chaos, violence and despair at the Superdome and the Convention Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina convinced Houston officials that they must find a better way, several police officials said.

"We are not encouraging the general public to go into the streets looking for shelter," White said Friday morning at a televised news conference. Later in the day, he emphasized that the Astrodome and the convention center here "are not shelters." The mayor also said that "most folks are better off in their homes."

The mayor even declined to name a shelter where people might go, saying that the police and emergency people will open shelters "without announcements to the general public."