JASPER, Tex., Sept. 24 -- "Guys, we got looters at the Chevron! Let's go!"
So screamed the police chief of this hurricane-bedeviled east Texas town on Saturday afternoon.
Having been pounded by Rita overnight, Jasper on Saturday had no electricity, no water pressure and no working sewage-treatment plant. Gasoline was all gone. The hospital had closed, and hundreds of wind-shredded trees had trapped many of the town's 8,000 residents inside their homes. There were also a thousand or so stranded hurricane evacuees from Houston, Galveston and points south who had tossed up here Friday in futile attempts to outrun Rita. They had been messily housed at three schools, where there were no cots and no lights and the toilets were backing up.
And those looters. Police dispatch said they were hitting the grocery next to the Sonic drive-in restaurant.
"We already arrested five of them," said Todd Hunter, chief of police. "They aren't evacuees. They're local idiots."
Jasper has a police force of 18 officers; not enough, Hunter said, to deal with hurricane damage, looters and a horde of strangers who are out of gas.
Through no fault of his own, Hunter was in charge of dealing with hungry, exhausted and increasingly irritable outsiders. They had gotten stuck in the town, but it was never supposed to be part of any evacuation route. That is because hurricanes, Hunter said, have a way of smacking Jasper, which is about 90 miles north of the Gulf Coast, and racking it with roof-ripping winds.
Those winds had largely cut the town off from the outside world for much of Saturday, with hundreds of trees down on roads into and out of town. In Jasper's crowded isolation, hurricane-battered hometown folks and their local officials had no choice but to find a way to endure and accommodate the sudden crowd of needy strangers.
Although the weather had largely cleared by late Saturday afternoon, the few evacuees who had gas could not leave. They were milling around in the dark, smelly hallways of the schools-turned-shelters because police told them there was no safe way to drive away from Jasper.
A handful of Texas state troopers arrived here in the late afternoon, but, Hunter said, they did not want to help the city with security at the shelters. He also said power was unlikely to be restored for several weeks because of extensive hurricane damage here and in Beaumont, which supplies electricity for Jasper and was also hit hard by Rita.
As far any other imminent assistance for Jasper, Hunter said 1,500 meals have been promised for Sunday, along with a generator that would allow the water department and sewer system to start up. But he said there was no prospect, yet, of deliveries of fuel.
"The state police are using my fuel," he said.
