Hello, Rita!

I made my way out to the parking garage mouth about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 4, to find a spectacle that I've yet to find the dead-on words to describe. Wind and rain ripped down the street so fast that it almost defied comprehension. Jaw-dropping? Awe-inspiring? What the hell was this?
The closest I've come to an accurate description is being at the end of a hydroblaster - and the storm was almost two hours from peaking.
Live TV broadcasts from the parking lots were long over. This was showtime, a meteorological maelstrom of water-spraying violence unrivaled by anything on this Earth other than a tornado. Damn, it was impressive.
A dozen or so people stood there mesmerized. The outside media now seemed impressed. Hurricane Katrina comparisons were made. No one spoke, with the only sound being the incessant howl of wind and the occasional odd piece of debris tumbling ass-over-teakettle down the street. What was that? A part off a rooftop AC unit? A street sign? Who knows? The speed at which it went by often made it unidentifiable.
The event was made more surreal by how the wind played in the corridors that the downtown buildings created. There was wind coming from behind us, wind going right to left to right. Then there was the wind going left to right under a street light 150 or so yards away, waltzing in misty vortexes. Why was the streetlight on? In fact, why where there other lights on around downtown, in random windows here and there?
Occasionally, great fists of wind punctuated the incessant drone, sending globe-shaped balls of water skyrocketing.
There was a brief lull in the entertainment, and we thought we'd seen the worst of it. But suddenly, at around 3:15 a.m., there it was, as if it were the greatest, loudest rock 'n' band in the world coming out to play its most popular song at the encore. The wind intensity suddenly face-slapped the city, grinding and mauling, screaming and whirling.
Damn, now THIS was really impressive.
How long did it last? Fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes?
I don't remember.
It died down again, and then the wind shifted, sending water and debris into our safe haven, so we took our beers and fled to the top floor, where we had a different view, one mostly of flying roof debris, much of it coming from our own building. Inside the third floor, it was a cave, with dripping water everywhere.
By this time, we were tired.
Around 5 a.m., most of us went to bed, sprawled on sleeping bags on floors throughout the building, trying to sleep knowing that the hardest part of our work was to come. And trying to understand what we had just seen.
Damn.

Another Brick in the Eyewall

The flurry of newsroom activity Friday afternoon and into the evening grew in proportion to strengthening storm outside as Hurricane Rita ground her way ashore. Reporters, photographers and editors worked frantically to be a live news organization through our web site: www.beaumontenterprise.com.
What all we did is a blur now, but we had a plan.
We had a reporter stationed to ride it out with the command center folks in a nearby building, home to the energy company, Entergy. We had a reporter at the Port of Beaumont aboard the USS Cape Vincent, this mammoth ship used to transport, among other things, heavy military equipment to Iraq. This ship is one of the world's largest. They had moved all the emergency crews and their equipment over there. We had a reporter with the Orange County emergency folks, who were hunkered down north of the county, which was supposed go under water.We had a reporter about 45 miles to the north.We had folks set up a news desk at the Houston Chronicle to act as an auxiliary newsroom in case we got cut off. We had folks all the way up as far north as Tyler, still reporting on the exodus struggles.We had a reporter and a photographer on the east side of where the storm was expected to hit. We hoped all this planning and preparation would result in news getting out and onto our web site.
Watching Hurricane Rita gain intensity was interesting. The breeze grew stiff and constant by noon. Bands of rain and wind moved through, followed by relative calm and then an even stronger band. Finally, there was sustained wind of tropical-storm force but not much rain. An alarming forecast said the storm could park over us, like Tropical Storm Allison did in 2001, dumping a fantastic amount of rain and causing catastrophic flooding throughout Southeast Texas. Mercifully, the storm ultimately picked up speed and moved on through.
Whoever designed our building made it perfect for hurricane watching. We stood at the garage mouth, only feet away from the action, and watched Rita gradually unveil her awesome might.
There are some funny things to note about our storm preparation at the newspaper.
They waited until the last minute to order portable toilets, knowing water service likely would be cut off. But the toilets never came, because the suppliers fled.
Some Enterprise employees set out on a recon mission for portable toilets. Yes, we decided to steal toilets, from construction sites or wherever. We did the can suppliers a favor. Any untethered john outside likely would fly away and dump crap all over the place. We managed to grab two of them and set them up near the pressroom of our building. We probably saved some poor property owner from coming home to find a poop-encrusted Port O Can sticking out of his pretty bay window.
Meanwhile, newsroom skylights became a concern a day earlier, but apparently they couldn't be boarded up, so to protect them, maintenance workers used duct tape to anchor paper-thin plastic sheets, like Glad Wrap or something, over them. Within hours - a full day before the storm - a gentle breeze had blown it all away.
Downstairs, I noticed that they'd taped the executive office windows. However, they put the tape on the outside. Did they really think the tape would hold up under the predicted 150 mph wind gusts and 20 inches of blinding rain for more than 16 hours?
During the afternoon on storm day, some twinky representing Chili's, Johnny Carino's and other restaurants whose names I didn't catch called and said we needed to get into the paper how their employees could get assistance. I told her to post it on her web site. I don't think the 20-something Chili's waitresses, waiters and cooks are among our most loyal subscribers.
The Red Cross e-mailed a news release bragging about the great shelters set up in sprinkle-whipped Houston. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department sent an urgent, all-caps news release declaring that a bunch of state parks would be closed until further notice. Yeah, all anyone could think about right then was getting out there into the great outdoors.
It started to drizzle about 5 p.m., with not-very-scary tropical storm winds blowing. An hour later, a slight lashing began. I moved all my food, clothes and sleeping stuff to some guy's office downstairs. The office has it's own thermostat and a fan, so I thought I was set.
Then the storm really started lashing. It was amusing to see all the thrill-seeking journalists from CNN, the AP and whatnot, wearing their khaki Oshkosh storm-assault outfits with 10,000 pockets. They hung out at garage entrance, waiting for the storm to grow worse before they headed out to take some dramatic footage/photos.
By then, our coverage had turned nto a bit of a logistical nightmare. Lots of confusion and out-of-pocket reports.
The storm grew exponentially from there. The power company warned of outages around 6:30 p.m. Our adrenaline was pumping. People grew edgy, and conversations among us grew tense.
Then came a small morale booster, sent out by the New York Times News Service over the national wire:

BC-RITA-PARTNERS-ADVISORY-NYT Editors, we
commend to your attention storm coverage from NewYork Times News Service partner
news organizations, includingHearst Newspapers and Cox News Service, but
especially articlesfrom The Houston Chronicle and The Beaumont Enterprise, two
Hearstpapers in the path of Hurricane Rita. Their unique
perspectives lend an authenticity to storm stories that cannot be matched.

It was 9:29 p.m. when hurricane-force winds reached downtown Beaumont, and it was nothing like I'd ever seen, and I was in Houston in 1983 when Hurricane Alicia, a Category 3 storm, blasted through. Rita went to town like a mighty firehose - with seven hours to go before the storm's peak. In the newsroom, the windows appeared to be breathing, so we ran away to another floor.

An hour later, however, the outside media hanging out in our building still seemed unimpressed. There were all kinds of TV folks doing wobbly legged standups out in a nearby parking lot.
That didn't last long.
But the aforementioned devastated Glad Bag skylight protection ultimately met an entertaining fate. A big-ass chunk of it, like 30 feet long, got wrapped around a street light across the street from the garage mouth and was madly flapping in the wind. A nearby streetlight provided nice lighting for the TV crews, who were all filming it to illustrate wind ferocity. The TV crews continued live broadcasts, including FOX News from our parking lot. Some dope from the Dallas Morning News rode around on a bicycle.
At about 11:30 p.m., we lost landline telephones and Internet access, so we used cell phones to dictate stories to our desk at the Chronicle, where they could update our web site. An hour or so later, it was clear the storm was about to be here. I wanted to catch the eyewall come through, so I crawled under a downstairs desk and tried to sleep, but a barking dog in a nearby room kept me from doing so. Lots of employees brought pets up to work. It was cute, but it later became an irritating hassle. One cat disappeared, and we've heard it meowing several times since then, trapped somewhere inside the building.
At 1:30 p.m., the power died, so I gave up on sleeping, grabbed a couple of beers out of my cooler and went down to the garage mouth to watch the apocalypse roll in.
Work for the day was over.

Before the Storm

I slept under my desk Thursday night. Part of me wanted to go home, but I'd secured the house - twice - and was ready for the storm, so I stayed at the office, as did a handful of newsroom staffers as well as some outside media.
I'd brought enough food to last for at least two weeks: peanut butter, bread, fruit bars and stuff with enough chemicals in them to rival the shelf life of nuclear fuel rods.
I started the day with a seven-mile run down a normally busy freeway. I saw an occasional emergency vehicle, but otherwise the streets were deserted. Everyone had fled, and nothing was open. I ran down to Lamar University, and on the way back, a charter bus driver stopped and asked for directions to the civic center, where he was to pick up evacuees and get them out of here. I hopped in his bus and showed him the way.
I discovered a shower in the press room, albeit a pretty gnarly shower. Press guys are gnarly people, so I wasn't surprised. Lots of ink. These guys pee ink.
The day was spent planning, arraying reporters throughout the region and filing lots of online stories. By midday, the clouds rolled in and a sustained breeze started.
It felt like having my neck laid out before a guillotine, with the blade agonizingly descended inch by inch, hour by hour.
Reports continued to vary on where Hurricane Rita would strike and how strong she would be.
Mercifully, the winds had dropped from Category 5 to 4 and then a strong 3, but the projected track didn't waiver. It was heading straight for us.

The Coming Storm

Residents along the Gulf and East coasts start twitching when meteorologists point to nebulous, ominous swirls of clouds out there in the ocean.
Will this be the one that finally strikes here, like they said it eventually would?
So we watch and feel partially relieved - and sometimes partially disappointed - when they go somewhere else. The more dominant, pragmatic and fearful side of human nature wants it to go away, but the smaller voice of curiosity speaks of something interesting to be experienced.
When Hurricane Rita entered the Gulf after shooting the gap between Florida and Cuba - always a bad thing because it passes over no land to take away some steam - the early forecasts called for it hitting the South Texas coast around Port O'Connor, roughly the same spot where Hurricane Carla, a Category 4 storm, blasted into the state in 1961.
The decision for the wife and kids to evacuate came quickly Wednesday, Sept. 21, while the storm was on its way to becoming a catastrophic Category 5 and the third most intense storm on record.
We decided to send them to a friend's home in DeRidder, La. They left early and got there 90 minutes later. Hours later, the same drive would take 10 hours as panicked Gulf Coast residents, including millions from the Houston area, fled north, west and east.
My parents left Houston early and were rewarded with a breeze of a drive to San Antonio. My sister and her family left Houston hours later and were rewarded with 1 mph bumper-to-bumper traffic and gas outages. They got a lucky break and found gas along the way.
After a stressful night of sleep Wednesday, I awoke early Thursday, Sept. 22, went on the Web and saw that the storm's track had put us right in the cross hairs. With the highways still snarled, it was too late to send the family out of DeRidder, which was in the storm's track as well.
I quickly secured the house as best I could, loaded my Nissan Pathfinder to the brim with as many valuables as I could find, left the house and went to work.
I haven't spent a night at home since.

Hurricane Rita Overview-Sept. 27

Experiencing hurricanes is like other profound life moments, such as a wedding day, divorce, having children or losing a loved one. You're never really the same after crossing through that door, and you suddenly find yourself among a new crowd of those who know.
Like the Grand Canyon, a hurricane can't begin to be understood unless you're there. There are people who say they've been through one, pointing to a storm that made landfal 100 miles away, but it doesn't count as much unless you're within a few miles of that apocalyptic eyewall, a driving hydroblaster of fury that I've found difficult to accurately describe. This was a Category 3 storm that punched us right in the gut. I can't even imagine a Category 4 or 5 event.
As managing editor for news, business and photography for the Beaumont Enterprise, a 60,000-circulation daily newspaper in Southeast Texas, I have spent the last week in the center of the kind of story that a journalist, if lucky, gets to cover once in a career.
However, we did have our hands full in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.
Hurricanes in general come in three phases: the approach, the storm and the aftermath. Each stage comes with its own set of dramatic actions, emotions and rapid-fire surprises. Many of us here have endured an emotional washing machine of dealing with family safety, helping to coordinate news coverage, coping with the damage to our own homes and just trying to take care of ourselves healthwise. People do funny things when they're stressed and run down.
But there is something awe-inspiring, spectacular and highly entertaining about hurricanes. We were in a fortress of a building that allowed us a safe, front-row seat to a jaw-dropping display of meteorological might.
During the 17- to 20-hour work days we've been pulling over the past week, I've jotted some notes on what I've seen and experienced. I will try to capture all that as best I can in this blog.
As of this writing, my wife and two young sons are safe with her parents in Virginia after riding out the storm in DeRidder, La., about 100 miles northeast of here. It was an unfortunate decision to send them there, because they were hit hard as well. But when the decision was made to go there, Hurricane Rita was predicted to go elsewhere, and by the time the storm trackers put it here, the roads were snarled with slow-moving traffic and gas shortages. The family is fine, and they were well cared for by the generous people in DeRidder.
Our home has serious damage, and the skeleton news staff is working in a hot, steamy building under taxing conditions. The presses are not running, but we are putting out news in rapid fashion at www.beaumontenterprise.com
Some of these stories were called in by cell phone, but we have working computers now and are able to send information and photos from here.
The staff here has performed brilliantly and courageously.
I'll do my best to capture the spirit, emotions and sometimes humor of this amazing event.