HOUSTON – Wilma Skinner would like to scream at the officials of this city. If only someone would pick up their phone.
“I done called for a shelter, I done called for help. There ain’t none. No one answers,” she said, standing in blistering heat outside a check-cashing store that had just run out of its main commodity. “Everyone just says, ‘Get out, get out.’ I’ve got no way of getting out. And now I’ve got no money.”
With Hurricane Rita breathing down Houston’s neck, those with cars were stuck in gridlock trying to get out. Those like Skinner – poor, and with a broken-down car – were simply stuck, and fuming at being abandoned, they say.
“All the banks are closed and I just got off work,” said Thomas Visor, holding his sweaty paycheck as he, too, tried to get inside the store, where more than 100 people, all of them black or Hispanic, fretted in line. “This is crazy. How are you supposed to evacuate a hurricane if you don’t have money? Answer me that?”
Some of those who did have money, and did try to get out, didn’t get very far.
Judie Anderson of La Porte, Texas, covered just 45 miles in 12 hours. She had been on the road since 10 p.m. Wednesday, headed toward Oklahoma, which by Thursday was still very far away.
“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They say, ‘We’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina.’ Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”
For the poor and the disenfranchised, the mighty evacuation orders that preceded Rita were something they could only ignore.
Eddie McKinney, 64, who had no home, no teeth and a torn shirt, stood outside the EZ Pawn shop, drinking a beer under a sign that said, “No Loitering.”
“We got no other choice but to stay here. We’re homeless and we’re broke,” he said. “I thought about going to Dallas, but now it’s too late. I got no way to get there.”
Where will he stay?
“A nice white man gave me a motel room for three days. Just walked up and said, ‘Here.’ So my buddy and me will stick it out,” he said, pointing to another homeless man. “We got a half-gallon of whiskey and a room.”
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