Stuck in Traffic Experiences

I was wondering if people would be willing to share their experiences of being evacuated-hurricanes, flooding, snowstorm, etc. I've read some of the stories already posted.

I'm interested in experiences being stuck in those long lines on the freeway/highway. What's it like? What should one expect?

What was gas mileage like in your BOV?
Gas station lines?
Use your gas cans in traffic or pull off and discretely fill up?

Lessons learned, what worked, what didn't, things to have or not have, etc.

Thanks in Advance!

My experiences are to wait until the herd passes (after an evacuation has been called), which means having 12 hours to pack, make arrangements (plans) for everything. We hit the virtually abandoned Interstate and make 75 MPH all the way to our place of refuge.

We had a front-row seat when Houston evacuated before Hurricane Rita. Our front door is three blocks off I-45, the main route north out of Houston. We had planned on evacuating but even by Wednesday afternoon the roads were gridlocked. The storm wasn't going to hit until Saturday.

Random rememberances:
1. Getting out of our neighborhood was impossible as we exit right on to I-45.
2. Getting back to our neighborhood was also very, very tough.
3. Businesses with large parking lots along I-45 turned into refugee camps. People were running out of gas, cars were breaking down, and people were just wearing out. They'd pull into the parking lots and set up "camp". The amount of garbage left behind was incredible.
4. People drove like maniacs through ditches, wrong way down streets, along shoulders, all at really high rates of speed. Pee on the side of the road at your own risk!
5. If you could see it on a map so could 100,000 other people.
6. A normal 4-hour drive took a MINIMUM of 19 hours.
7. Service stations had no gas for the evacuation and the return!
8. The gridlock prevented gas tankers from refilling gas stations.
9. Lots of people who didn't need to flee did. Usually taking two or more cars.
10. It'd be hard to carry too much gasoline, but store it safely and hidden. Hidden in suitcases tied to the roof works.
11. Strangers can be suprisingly kind.
12. If you abandon your car it WILL be broken into and stripped.
13. Police blocked I-45 on/off-ramps from Houston to half-way to Dallas to keep the traffic flowing "smoothly". Once you were on the road you could not exit except by driving through the ditch.
14. People wanted ice and gas.
15. 2 mph in 100F heat is HOT!!! Drink lots of water.
16. Running your AC in the above situation will overheat your car and suck your gas. A fan you can plug into the cigarette lighter helps a lot, the bigger the better.
17. Kids/pets can't handle it as well as you. Popcicles help a lot.
18. Bring too much gas, too much ice (summer), too much money, and a few bags of cookies. If you have space left over stuff other gear in there.
19. Try to stay calm. Freaking out doesn't help and can makes a situation suddenly get much worse.
20. It really was a nightmare out of a bad sci-fi EOTW movie...

Also see here and here .

-Blast

Exactly as I have predicted/expected for years! Good report!!!

One day in the LA (CA) traffic and you will be ready to confront anything that the rest of the US throws at you.

We went north on I-5 thru Seattle about this time last year, it was as bad, or maybe worse, as anything I ever saw in L.A. Think the 405, on the busiest day of the week, a holiday to boot, with three lanes blocked every other ramp. It was BAD!!!

"Amen!" yells the audience.

During college, if I left after 6:05 am, my 19 mile drive took 3 hours. Didn't matter if it was surface roads or freeway.

That is interesting. All you ever hear from the media is "Go! Go! Go!" Did they ever advise people to stay put?

Yes, actually the Houston media and Mayor White kept showing big maps of expected danger areas and asked only people in those areas to evacuate. They tried to organize it so people closest to the shore would leave first and then the next closest would leave, etc.

It didn't work out that way though. Everyone loaded up the car and headed out. The mayor got to the point of begging people not to add to the traffic chaos and for those of us who live near the evacuation routes to offer whatever help we could to the stranded motorists.

-Blast

Doesn't always work that way. I-10 (East and West) as well as I-55 North out of New Orleans were still gridlocked when Katrina made landfall.

My advice, carry as much extra fuel as you safely can and start in a "non-obvious" direction (if possible). If I were evacuating from Rita after seeing the evacuation from Katrina, I would have started by going South.

"South" out of Houston requires a boat.

Roads heading east were mostly open, though that was because everything in that direction was either destroyed or booked up due to Katrina. Also note, Rita ended up hitting east of Houston. My neighbors who evacuated to the east ended up in worse conditions than those who stayed here!

-Blast

I've been stuck in traffic a couple times. One issue I've seen is automatic transmissions get too hot sitting like that since most people leave it in drive and let it sit and idle to keep the ac running. This causes heat to build up in the torque converter. So if your driving an automatic get a cooler and add it on, if yours already has the factory cooler get a larger one.
People try to make U turns in the middle of the road because it looks like its just grass, well its not. The center divider of a highway is designed to trap a vehicle to prevent you from driving across into the other lane going the wrong way and to allow water drainage. That center is grass on top of soft sand that you will sink into and people don't realize this so they get tired of waiting and cut into the center and get stuck, only a few true 4x4's can make it through most places, people with AWD cars, front wheel drive and 2 wheel drive are going to sink in.

Blast's list hit Katrina evac from New Orleans to Birmingham, Al right on the head. Except I had to wait till Katrina had made land fall. I thought that it would be like blast said every body that was going would have been gone the day before but it didn't work out that way. It took me 28 hours (two hours for a quick nap in my truck)to make the 6 hour drive. All the small towns along the way were not letting anyone in except in life or death emergencies, and no gas, food, or water wasn't considered an emergency. I wasn't able to get gas until Hattisburg before I could get gas. When we were able to leave the interstate all the stations within 4 miles of the interstate were either full of cars or out of gas. I heard of a few instances of armed bad guy's, but being a single man in a very large 4X4 with a shot gun in the rear window I guesse didn't make a very enticing target.

Call me naiive, but I don't suppose anyone from any local, state or government agency has done any sort of inquiry of the people who evacuated to find out what went wrong and (just maybe) how to fix it next time? I keep hoping for common sense to break out somewhere...

Let me clarify something, the few storms that I have evacuated from have been small ones that affected much smaller areas than Katrina and Rita. For those events, my method worked fine.

Because of Katrina and Rita, local/state govt's, IMHO, will now call for evacuations of coastal areas, than those areas just inland, and finally those low lying areas farther inland. I don't think that the govt's involved will put off the decision making as long as they have tended to in the past. If anything, they are going to call for evacuations earlier (probably too early) and no doubt needlessly, for some areas. This means that large scale public evacuations on the Katrina/Rita scales are going to be more frequent.

Some of the areas that haven't been addressed, as I see it:
1) Gas stations along Evacuation Routes are not being required (new construction) to have larger gasoline/diesel storage capacity.

2) Shelter supplies are not being procured and pre-positioned in sufficient quantities.

3)Shelter supplies that have been procured and pre-positioned are not being adequately stored under the proper storage conditions.

4) I'm not seeing any pre-hurricane/evacuation public education campaign being conducted except to maybe small groups here and there.

The lessons that all of us here, and a few PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. around the country, have always known or recently learned are:
1) You will wait a long, dry, hungry, and insecure time waiting for any level of govt to arrive to bail you out of the situation you've allowed yourself to be in.

2) "Just in Time delivery" doesn't work well in evacuation situations.

3) The govt's advice about having 72 hours of supplies on hand is BUNK! I know that because on those same web pages, they also then advise people to have more than that in order to be "properly prepared".

4) I am reminded that these are the same people who brought us the Vietnam War, a socialized welfare dependant system, Crime safety through Gun Control, etc, etc...

Actually, yes they have at least here in Texas. The governor, a bunch of mayors of affected towns, emergency rescue workers, police, and logistics experts sat down in town meetings and listened to people's experiences. From that they set in place several plans such as:
1. A formal plan to make I-45 and several other roads contraflow (you can drive north in the south-bound lanes).
2. Arranged to make sure more gasoline was available.
3. Pre-positioning supplies at several major relief centers (risky proposition, people will complain about the money spent if the supplies aren't used ).
4.Set up a network of traffic control police throughout the state to direct traffic. Small town cops worked 20-hour shifts directing traffic outside of Houston. Next time they'll have help.
5. Set up a program to teach people when to evacuate and when to stay. (Next time it'll be a lot harder to convince people to leave!).

They set up more than just this, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

-Blast

That's a relief. I just hope they follow through, because let's face it, a majority of the people evacuating are likely to be somewhere between "somewhat under-prepared" and "completely unprepared."

Just remembered another, in the next evacuation they'll preposition tanker trucks at rest-stops and several other spots as mobile gas stations.

Last summer Houston had a big "Run from water, hide from wind!" promotion to teach people when to evacuate and when to stay. I haven't seen anything like that this year but it's early.

-Blast

With the price of gas now days pretty soon you won't have to worry about being "stuck in traffic" because there will be no traffic........that's what I keep saying to myself and then I keep calling myself a liar because I see more and more traffic.

I think that the rasing price of gas in one way that Bush is paying for the wars of liberation that we are having now days.

I don't know about in your neck of the woods but here gas is at $3.65 per gallon.

Only have left 72 gallons of the 1,000 gallons that I pre-paid for $1.69 per about two years ago, pretty soon I'll be one of you.....using my scooters more now days with 85 miles per gallon.

I wish gas prices where that low here!

I'm paying about $4.00 KYD per gallon (about $4.76 USD). In all honesty, its not bad (compared to some caribbean islands), but after hurricane Ivan, today's prices were a pipe dream.

And it usually takes 2 months for prices to take effect, so what we are paying now is what it cost 2 months ago to purchase the petro/gas. I'm dreading the next 6 months.

Kris

This time last year we made our trip of a lifetime, to Alaska, via BC and the Yukon. In BC (which we rapidly learned stands not for British Columbia, but Bring Cash), we paid over $5 a gal for no-name regular...

I still think that if I had to do something like run ahead of a disaster, I would take at least 4 5-gallon buckets with lids filled with sawdust and one empty one, to use as toilets. Those clip-on camping toilet seats made for standard 5-gal buckets are great.

Put a couple of inches of sawdust in the bottom of the empty bucket and clip on the toilet seat, add some sawdust after most deposits. When full, remove toilet seat, attach lid. Repeat.

This would be esp good if you have a woman and kids on board. Girls can't just step behind a tree and look for Indians, you know. On I-5 here in the Pacific Northwest, the rest areas are 40+ miles apart, if they're all open.

Sue

We actually carry a porta potty in the back of the van when we leave for trips/evacuations. The ladies just climb over the back seat and they actually have semi-privacy.

The ladies in my household are much more enthusiastic about camping when we take the porta potty along with us.

The porta potty has proven to be a great investment from about 20 years ago.

Our trick is just to line the bucket with plastic bags (there are special potty bags made just for that purpose). That way you can remove a bag, tie it (tightly), store it until convenient to dispose of, and put in a new one. Between changings, a little PineSol in the bag helps with odor control.

Another little goodie that helps women "look for Indians" is the Lady J , a female funnel if you will. My wife can use that and an empty milk jug with a minumum of exposure...

Wouldn't putting it in 'neutral' or 'park' while sitting (instead of 'drive') avoid this issue?

-john