Recently there have been a lot of articles on the upcoming 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  A devastating weather event that killed over 1800 people, destroyed New Orleans, sent the largest wave of American refugees across the US since the Dustbowl days, and started many people thinking more intently about climate change.

Along with the rest of the nation we watched on television as the true aftermath of the storm unfolded.  Days later we received a large number of evacuees in Houston and many took up temporary residence here as New Orleans was being rebuilt.

Houston of course missed the immediate effects of Katrina but a few weeks later we became worried that Hurricane Rita.  Katrina refugees feared that they would have to weather a second major Hurricane in less than a month.

I remember the build up in tension across the city as we watched Rita come up the Gulf.  The supermarkets, convenience stores, and sporting goods stores were picked clean of food, batteries, and camping supplies.  The weathermen were on practically 24 hours a day.

Three days before the storm a small trickle of cars started coming in from the coast. A day later it was a torrent of cars.  The coastal residents didn’t need to be forced to evacuate.  The lessons of Katrina were too recent and too raw to forget. The highways were clogged with cars and some began running out of gas just sitting in the gridlock for hours.

My boss shut down the office that day and told everyone to come back after the storm.

I was living in Alief, on the southwestern part of Houston, at the time.  I seriously began to ask myself if staying was such a good idea. But then I thought about the clogged roads and concluded that it was probably already too late.  On TV the reports were all about the preparations to receive the storm.  Plywood was in short supply as businesses and homeowners were boarding up windows.

I drove round the city that night and looked at the preparations.  A car dealership had boarded up one window but the window next to that was wide open.  Maybe they had run out of wood or the employees had fled?  The city was a ghost town.  I went to a local bar that I frequented.  A few diehard barflies kept one bartender and a pair of waitresses company.  Everyone was nervous.  A waitress told me that she couldn’t wait for her shift to end.  She had packed up her apartment and was moving to Oklahoma as soon as it was over.

The day before the storm and the city was edgy and tense.  Everything that could be done short of moving the city a couple hundred miles further inland had been done.  The coastal traffic had ebbed.  No one was left in the area between Houston and Galveston.

The first few waves of clouds from the storm arrived around dusk.  The sky was oddly green.  The weathermen predicted landfall sometime during the night.  I don’t know why it is, but Hurricanes prefer to arrive in the early morning.  I put a flashlight next to my bed and went to sleep.

Of course nothing happened.  At the last moment the storm veered towards the north and went into East Texas and western Louisiana.  That part of the state is much less populated and had already evacuated.  The city was spared the brunt of the storm.

We had dodged the bullet this time but would not be spared three years later when Hurricane Ike came to town.  Back in 2005 we got on with cleaning up and integrating the Katrina evacuees into Houston.

I have to admit that Houston has for the most part benefited from Hurricanes.  First was the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston and made Houston into the largest city in Texas.  Grim but true.  And now we received a large dose of culture and flavor from the Katrina refugees that decided to stay in Houston and make it their new home. I think that these refugees and their influence have helped make Houston into a more cosmopolitan and livable city and this in turn has helped draw in more immigrants from other parts of the country.