Paul wrote:

It seems more of our fellow fractalists have had there areas hit by the latest hurricane:

Timothy I. Wegner

I'm fine. I live in central Houston. NASA closed Wednesday at noon. They are more vulnerable because they are closer to the Gulf and many employees (unlike myself) live near the water in Seabrook or Clear Lake. I had tanked up my car Tuesday (good thinking as it turned out.) The initial reports were that Rita would hit Matagorda Bay southwest of Houston. At that point I wasn't planning on evacuating. But the projected point kept sliding north (chaotic dynamics going on here - truth is they really don't have any idea four days ahead, just probabilities.) Thursday morning the most probable landfall was dead on Houston, and the hurricane was now category five. Remembering the square law of friction from high school physics - hmmmm - a 150 mph wind pushes 25 times more than a 30 mph wind ... we left for Austin at 1:00 pm Thursday. Oops. Traffic was deadlocked about ten miles out of town. We moved ten feet every ten minutes. Temperature as 100 degrees. Some people did not have much gas, so they turned off the air conditioning or even their motors. At 4:30 we hadn't made significant progress, the hurricane was downgraded to category 4, and landfall was now projected half way to the Lousiana border to the east. That meant we'd get the "clean" side of the storm. We also heard the mayor say that those not in flood danger should stay in place and let the others get out. We turned around and came home. As with New Orleans, there were some lessons learned - evacuating a metropolitan area of several million people with private vehicles is problematic from a number of points of view - congestion and gasoline. Basically, today there's no gasoline left in Houston, though our two cars are OK. As it turned out we probably could have left Friday morning - by then the incoming lanes of major freeways were converted to outbound. The actual storm moved even farther away, so we slept through the worst of it last night. This morning there were small branches and leaves everywhere, and few large limbs down. We had electricity. One nearby street didn't. Strangely, there was very little rain. Allison, a much smaller storm, basically sat on top of Houston and drowned the city. Galveston has some problems but is not devastated as might have happened with a direct hit. Things are undoubtedly much worse in Port Arthur and Beaumont that were directly hit. That's the report from here. Tim