'All I got: Cash, clothes, God'

2005-09-24 11:38

Juan A Lozano

Texas - Far from home, literally scattered to the winds, tens of thousands of Texans sat in shelters early on Saturday, killing time, watching television and wondering what Hurricane Rita had left of their homes.

"It's been terrible, believe me," said Rosa Castro, who had driven more than 17 hours by Friday. Her sister behind the wheel, seven children in tow, the car was idling on less than an eighth of a tank of gas.

Castro was hoping to get gas from a lone Shell station that had opened north of Houston. But her car was at the end of a kilometres-long line.

"I wondered why so many people in Katrina didn't move in time, and now I'm in the same situation," she said. "All I have is cash, clothes and God."

Araceli Ovilla, 29, from Houston, waited until Friday before she, her husband and four children left their home and tried heading to Dallas. They left because they feared the bayou near their home might overflow and flood their neighbourhood.

Ovilla said she doesn't regret fleeing her home.

"I told my husband if we stayed in our two-storey apartment, either water on the first floor could get us or the high winds if we were on the second floor would get us," Ovilla said, speaking in Spanish as she gathered outside the church early on Saturday talking with other evacuees.

She was among the thousands of people who fled Houston in the three days before Rita made landfall early Saturday - an evacuation that, while plagued by occasional missteps, managed to get nearly everyone to safety.

Still ahead of authorities lay the challenge of repopulating the area - getting millions of people back to Houston, and to the coastal area beyond, once the worst of the storm passed.

For the thousands in shelters, it was too early on Saturday to get a grasp of how damaged their communities back home were. Rita made landfall early Saturday along the Texas-Louisiana line, east of where forecasters originally said it might land.

In the lobby of the Victorian Inn & Suites in Nacogdoches, Ritesh Vyas, 26, who fled the hard-hit coastal town of Beaumont, saw TV images of fires burning in Galveston and said he wasn't sorry he sought safety.

In Tyler, at a shelter set up at the First Baptist Church Recreation Centre, James Wade of Port Arthur was keeping one eye on the weather back home and another on potential flooding in Tyler.

"It kind of makes you think a little bit. You leave one place to get away from the storm, and it may be someplace else," he said with a nervous laugh. "They said it probably won't be that bad. We'll get some wind and some rain here."

Wade, a construction worker at a coastal chemical plant, said he wondered what would be left of his home "when I get back, if I can go back."

He and an extended family that totalled 12 people, including four children and two grandchildren, made the daylong trip Thursday in a three-car caravan.

"I've been trying to figure out where I'm going to go to church on Sunday," he said. - Associated Press writers Matt Curry in Tyler and Jamie Stengle in Nacogdoches contributed to this report.

- AP