Arriving in Houston on Monday, September the nineteenth traveling South from the Dallas area, it was the usual four-hour drive. However, the return trip North two days later was difficult. On Tuesday, September twentieth the Mayor of Houston announced a mandatory evacuation ending early Friday morning, the twenty-third. Plans were executed swiftly at all levels of city, state and federal levels of the government to ensure that the chaos experienced in Louisiana would be avoided at all costs.

For two point five million residents of the four million population living in the city of Houston traveling from one to eight miles an hour for nine to twenty-three hours for a road trip usually taking four hours heading North to the Dallas area and at least five hours to San Antonio from Houston traveling within a thirty-six hour time frame, North and West were the only ways to get out of the city if the East and the South exits were closed down. Drivers and passengers passing out from heat exhaustion, stalled cars, numerous traffic accidents and running out of gasoline had become the normal way of life for most evacuees. Making it seem as though, the residents boarding up their windows and remaining in their homes were the intelligent ones.

Since gridlock had caused such havoc on the way to a safer place, the state governmentof Texas was jolted into a sense of reality and had enough time for a better plan for returning evacuees using the South and the East entrances into the city by only allowing a certain number of travelers on the roads at the same time by staggering the return routes ensuring a smoother and safer trip back into the city. It would have been a lot better for most of us getting out if they had used the same type of plan as they had done for getting the evacuees back into the city.