Rita and the News Media: A Study in Uselessness

My involvement with the evacuation of Houston due to Hurricane Rita was due to my significant other. I live in Denver, she lives in Houston and to explain the distance between us is quite a long story, one I won't tell now. She began her evacuation at 3:00 p. m. on Wednesday. Forty-two hours later, we met in San Antonio. My role throughout the first night of her slow-motion slog west was to keep her awake and talking and to try to find out how she could get out of the parking lot that was the Beltway. At 5:00 a. m. on Wednesday she was stuck on the overpass connecting the Beltway with I-10, forty miles from where she'd started. She'd been on it for two hours moving inches at a time. She was listening to a local talk radio station, her windows were down with the air conditioning off to conserve gas and it was over a hundred degrees outside her car. I was monitoring every news outlet I could find, switching back and forth between the major cable news carriers and the Houston stations on the Web. All the commentators were speaking of the intensity of the storm, of its bulls-eye on Galveston and the effects of twenty feet of water on the island. They spoke of this over and over and over, punctuated with pictures of stop and stop traffic on I-45.

What wasn't available was useful information. The media seemed enamoured of the storm, of its awesome power, of its destructive capability, of its economic impact on the country as it takes out all the refineries along the Houston Ship Channel, of four dollar a gallon gas and how smoothly the evacuation was going compared to that of blue-state Louisiana. Fox News was busy showing President Bush and Texas Governor Perry steppin' and fetchin' and slappin' each other on the back and congratulatin' themselves on a rebound of their collective images, CNN reported there was a big storm a' comin' incessantly complete with radar and satellite images and MSNBC was a confused muddle of the two extremes. The talk radio show Debbie had on in her car was busy debunking global warming as a cause of the increased intensity of hurricanes and the Houston news media web presence was a confused mass of all of the above with PDFs of the evacuation routes available.

Missing were such minor points as where water was available along the evacuation routes. The availability of alternate routes out of Houston was another conspicuous absence despite continuous traffic reports from helicopters: "Traffic on I-45 is at a standstill...." Fuel availability became a serious consideration after twenty hours of idling but there was no information other than reports that the Texas DOT was sending out fuel trucks to help stranded motorists, trucks that Debbie in her forty-two hours on the road never saw. Availability of food, likewise, was completely missing from the airwaves. We got some reports of opening of contra-flow lanes on I-10 from a San Antonio station - it didn't seem important to Houston media. Likewise, we couldn't determine where the entry points to the contra-flow lanes were. In short, the only thing lower than Rita's eye pressure was the vacuum of useful information.

I finally saw Debbie on Friday morning. I'd flown to San Antonio Thursday evening at her request. Her step-father and I met her in Schulenberg, Texas, about half-way between Houston and San Antonio, where she'd finally ran out of gas. We had driven an alternate route running parallel to I-10. Along that route, the gas stations were open and had gas, the restaurants and convenience stores were open, traffic flowed freely, all this eighteen miles south of the Interstate. No media were reporting that the route was open, that gas was available there, that there was food and water. In Schulenberg, the parking lots looked like scenes from a disaster movies. Families sat in their cars, their gas tanks empty, without water or food completely unaware that eighteen miles to the south, food, water and gas were available in plenty.

When we got back to San Antonio, Fox News was still congratulating the President and the Governor, CNN was still babbling about a big storm off the coast of Texas, MSNBC couldn't decide which side of the issue to cover and the local media were reporting receiving the evacuees from Houston. A hundred twenty plus people had died in the evacuation - an accurate figure is hard to find because the counties reported casualties individually. Perhaps knowing where some food or water or gas had been might have saved lives. But the location of food, of water, of gas or shelter, of entrances to contra-flow lanes and of wide-open alternate routes isn't as sexy as a category 5 hurricane. It doesn't make ratings; therefore, in America, it isn't news.