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Considering this is the biggest evacuation ever attempted in US history, we didn't do too bad.

Not bad at all.

Not to mention the fact that the media is ignoring one important thing - those residents who evacuated for Rita won't be making the same mistakes again, i.e. traveling on I-45.

I may start a vanity thread on this, but my family and extended family (i.e. distant cousins), managed to move 45+ children, women, and the "elders"(my term,they don't like the term "elderly" or "senior citizens") from the Houston/Galveston, Corpus Christi, and Beaumont areas out to Austin and west of San Antonio to family members' homes who lived in those areas. Most of the men stayed to look after things, and were going to wait until we had more information. Even then, they knew where the closest relative was, and it was planned that if it was going to hit a certain area, they would leave those areas and stay at a nearby relative's place.

The weekend after we saw New Orleans fall apart, we had a mini-family reunion of sorts, and the topic eventually came up and we discussed what would we do about our families. To make a long story short, a few of the cousins put together lists of the individual families (several dozen) within our family, listing their contact information (including schools of the children, and places of employment for the adults), names and ages of family members, along with blood types and any special medical conditions where possible, and put together a map of where everybody lived across Texas and New Mexico.

A cousin who works for the state worked out evacuation routes depending on what part of the state people were in, that did not use any of the major highways (using mostly FM-type roads and backroads), and we even put together a little bit of information about locations of gas stations, rest stops, and hotels and nearest relatives or friends along those routes. Alternate routes were planned as well, at least one for each "major" route she laid out. Copies of thise maps were sent out to family members, and where possible, multiple families would meet up (meeting areas were mapped out, including areas where family members could come from the opposite direction to help them evacuate if needed).

Needless to say, we didn't think we'd be using it so fast, but when it became clear that a pretty wide area should be evacuated, nobody wasted time, and even those who left the Houston area thursday made it out here in a fraction of the time it was taking many people to get to Huntsville, Dallas, etc.

They may have had to take a more circuitous route to get out of those areas, but I think most agreed that they'd rather put more miles on their vehicles than hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic worrying about gas and water and bathrooms.

It is funny that when we were brainstorming this, we were throwing out all kinds of wild ideas, like trying to figure out where gas stations in various areas received their gas from (from North Texas, South Texas, East Texas, etc.), whether or not to get GPS units for every family, and a few other things, and even the stuff we actually did follow through on seemed a little crazy. After tuesday, none of it seemed too crazy.

Katrina taught us to rely on ourselves, our family, and our friends, before relying on any government.