By J. Lyn Carl, GalleryWatch.com
Beaumont, TX –
Gov. Rick Perry Sunday was touring hurricane-ravaged areas of Southeast Texas and making the rounds of the Sunday television news programs as well.
Early today, the governor visited the Emergency Operations Center in Beaumont in Jefferson County, where Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith said it looks like "a war zone" after that area and nearby Port Arthur and other Golden Triangle cities took the brunt of the storm.
Hurricane Rita moved onshore just east of Sabine Pass in the early hours Saturday, hammering an eight-county area of the Texas Gulf Coast and Southeast Texas.
Appearing this morning on "Fox News Sunday," ABC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation," Perry said local and state officials are still assessing the damages. "The good news is it appears there's been no loss of life," directly related to the storm, said the governor, calling that a "miracle" and "a blessing."
While Perry said local and state officials "have a pretty good handle" on the situation, Griffith complained about the "breakdown" in communications between local and state officials and federal officials. He said when the state made a request of the feds, "The bureaucracy is too large in Washington," and the requests don't get through and local governments don't get help. He cited an instance in which local officials sought to evacuate a group of elderly and special needs individuals from a Beaumont-area health facility and sought federal assistance. Griffith said he finally contacted U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who pulled the necessary strings (including contacting the White House) to get military aircraft and commercial aircraft involved in the airlift of those individuals.
Now that Rita has made landfall and has been downgraded to a tropical storm, she is still spreading rain in the far northeast corner of Texas and is moving into Arkansas. Thus, said Perry, the focus in Southeast Texas and the Golden Triangle area now is on search and rescue and the re-supplying of the affected areas.
Perry said there is significant residential and commercial damage along the Texas Gulf Coast and called the restoration of electric service "the big issue" for most of the affected areas. The cleanup effort is just beginning, said the governor, and the search and rescue effort will be much smaller than expected because so many coastal residents evacuated ahead of the storm.
That evacuation of more than two million coastal Texans caused major gridlock as motor vehicles began inching their way north. Trips that usually only took a couple of hours took from 15 to 24 hours as two major interstate highways - I-45 and I-10 - were "parking lots" of vehicles heading away from the coast. The result was traffic inching along at a snail's pace, mile after mile of bumper-to-bumper traffic, cars overheating in the 100-degree heat and vehicles running out of gas and sometimes being abandoned alongside roadways.
At the height of the evacuation, Perry ordered a contra-flow of traffic on I-45, with southbound lanes opened up to northbound traffic so that traffic on both sides of the interstate was moving north. Perry called the evacuation "monumental" and "probably the largest in the nation's history" as more than two million Texans were evacuated from coastal regions in a period of 36 hours. He called the evacuation "relatively orderly," but admitted that should such an evacuation occur in the future, lessons will have been learned, such as pre-positioning of gas tankers to refill motor vehicles that run out of gas during the evacuation, and perhaps a staggered approach to getting people out of one area of the state.
But, said Perry, "Getting them out of that storm's path was the mission - and that was effective."
Now the task is the return of those evacuees. The state late Saturday issued a plea to those who evacuated to not return to their home cities until the "all clear" is given by local officials. However, many evacuees who fled the Houston and Galveston areas that suffered only minimal damages began packing up and again clogging major thoroughfares into those cities. In Galveston, those who returned were turned away by city officials as Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas declared the city unsafe for the return of the island residents who fled. In Houston, Mayor Bill White urged residents not to return yet but instead to observe the state's proposed staggered plan to return evacuees to their coastal homes over a three-day period. Houston area schools were all ordered closed at least for Monday so residents who fled would not try to rush back so their children could attend school on Monday.
Today, Perry again issued his plea that those who evacuated observe the state's proposed evacuation return plan. Saying some areas are still dangerous because of debris and lack of electric power, the governor urged that evacuees who have clothing and bedding and food and water where they are should, "Just stay there."
Perry said most of the damages along the Texas coast are in an eight-county area that includes Liberty, Chambers, Jefferson, Jasper, Newton, Orange and other adjoining counties. Most of those areas remain without electricity and water and other supplies, which Perry called the "necessities of life" and the "necessities of normalcy." Many of the necessary supplies are coming in "on the back of a truck," he said, as relief efforts continue. He noted that one-half million gallons of gasoline were trucked into Southeast Texas in the last 24 hours. "There's a lot of relief coming into this area," said the governor.
State and local officials will conduct a visual reconnaissance today, according to the governor, who also addressed questions regarding oil refineries in the Golden Triangle area and offshore in the Gulf. "The refineries appear to be in real good shape," he said, noting one gas pipeline had been ruptured and is being repaired. The storm, however, missed making a major hit on the state's oil refineries, where approximately 25 percent of the nation's energy production occurs. The platforms in the Gulf made it through the storm "in real good shape," said Perry.
Although no deaths directly related to the storm have yet been reported, two dozen elderly and medically frail Texans died in an accident just south of Dallas aboard a charter bus being used to evacuate them to safety. Initial reports show that after a flat tire was changed on the bus carrying dozens of individuals, many with portable oxygen tanks, a fire reportedly erupted in a tire well. It is alleged that the fire caused a number of the oxygen tanks to explode, trapping many on the bus and leading to the fiery death of 24 aboard the bus.
Perry was questioned regarding his waiver of registration requirements for any commercial vehicles used to evacuate coastal Texans. "We didn't sign any waiver for any safety standards," said Perry, who noted state officials were simply "trying to get as many people out of harm's way as we could." He said the registration waiver had "nothing to do with safety standards," and that an investigation into this particular incident is ongoing.
Perry said there will be lessons learned from this emergency. "There will be a lot of look-backs," he said, and the result will be recommendations for future emergency events that not only will be important for all levels of government in Texas, but will also be shared with government officials in other states. "We moved 2.5 million people with a relative small amount of problems," he said.
But for now, search and rescue, relief and restoration are at the forefront of local, state and federal officials' efforts.
"We'll rebuild," said Perry. "We have truly dodged a major bullet. The resilient people of Southeast Texas will rebuild."