Hurricane Rita Drill Proves
Invaluable to Houston School District

HOUSTON - The experiences of September 2005 will resonate at Houston Independent School District for years to come.

"We've had a rough opening for school. That's probably a September we'll never forget," said Phillip Smith, assistant general manager of transportation services.

On the heels of Hurricane Katrina at the end of August, Hurricane Rita and its Category 5 winds rumbled through Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico the week of Sept. 18, its eye sight set on the Texas-Louisiana border. Houston ISD, which had just completed one of the largest natural disaster evacuations in U.S. history by helping bus some 250,000 people from the devastated New Orleans area, suddenly found itself faced with another "storm of the century."

But with lessons learned from Katrina, local government officials mobilized a mass evacuation of residents from all along the Texas coast, a move that most likely saved hundreds if not thousands of lives.

Phillip Smith, left, the assistant general manager of transportation for Houston ISD, and Aric Taylor, manager of routing and scheduling, coordinate Hurricane Rita evacuations on
Sept. 22 from Sam Austin Race Park.

By Sept. 20, four days before Rita hit the coast, the school district decided to close all schools on that Thursday and Friday in preparation for a storm meteorologists feared would surpass Katrina. Houston ISD quickly set up a staging area about 20 miles northwest
of downtown at Sam Houston race track, where school buses dropped off evacuees. Transit buses awaited, there to transport them to temporary shelters elsewhere.

From then on out the district hunkered down.

"All our buses were stacked at our (football) stadiums nose-to-nose in very tight compacted corners to protect the older buses from the winds," Smith explained. "Until Sunday when everything passed all those buses were parked in a secure area."

Rita eventually made landfall the early morning of Sept. 24 as a Category 3 about 90 miles to the east in Port Arthur and Beaumont on the Louisiana border. Despite the near-miss, lessons learned from Katrina enabled smooth evacuations and school closures, despite long lines of motorist on the area's highways. Smith said many of those fleeing the hurricane were from other areas outside Houston. They weren't aware of many other arteries they could travel.

"A little bit of that was panic on people's part that they couldn't take alternate routes. (City officials) tried to communicate that," he said. "I live right at I-10, and it was absolutely gridlocked."

Houston school bus drivers gather to receive evacuation assignments.

But by Thursday evening, as Hurricane Rita turned to the north, Smith said the roads began to clear.

Houston ISD never experienced a shortage of fuel, unlike the thousands who were turned away at commercial gas stations around town, and communications remained uninterrupted.

Earlier in the week, the district already had its fuel supplies in place and had directed bus drivers to top off their tanks following every trip. Houston ISD also achieved its No. 1 goal: ensuring uninterrupted communications. Smith said the transportation department checked and rechecked all communications lines and ensured contact numbers existed for all drivers and mechanics. Except for some isolated power outages, "We were in good shape," he said.

Classes started again on Sept. 28 with damage being "very minimal." Some school buildings had limited flooding.

Source: School Transportation News, November 2005. All rights reserved.