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Beaumont residents assess hit from Rita
Published September 27, 2005
BEAUMONT — As Brazoria County residents resumed their normal lives Monday, people here struggled for survival in the swath Hurricane Rita cut when she made landfall Saturday morning.
Nothing was open in Beaumont but the roads. Traffic lights hung dumbly from their wires, power lines snaked across almost all streets and so many trees were down it seemed the world had tipped from vertical to horizontal in some places.
So many pine trees had snapped, the smell was overwhelming and your eyes began to sting.
Jefferson County authorities said it could be as long as a month until power is restored and until then there won’t be electricity for gas pumps and grocery stores.
Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, frustrated when Federal Emergency Management Agency officials refused to release 50 generators because their intended destination already had power, told local law enforcement to take things by force if necessary.
“If y’all have enough police to take it away from them, take it away,” Griffith said at a briefing with emergency management officials from throughout the region.
But even as Griffith talked of the possibility of people starving to death, residents were making their way around road blocks back into the Jefferson, Hardin and Orange counties in the belief that they could hold out until civilization returns.
Wayne Loden, who didn’t evacuate, said he was not going anywhere.
“We’re a lot better off than the people who left,” said Loden, who rode out the storm with his wife, son and two grandchildren.
As the Loden family walked through Old Town, an upscale neighborhood once heavily wooded, they sounded the theme that was almost universal in this town.
“We’re all stocked up in the deep freeze,” said Tracy Loden, surrounded by fallen trees.
When asked what they would do for gas when their generators quit, most people said they’d simply drive to Baytown, where pumps were working.
They scoffed at the notion police manning roadblocks wouldn’t let them back in.
“I got news for them,” said Dickie Brocatto as he mowed his son’s lawn. “There’s ways around that.”
Griffith estimated 100,000 to 150,000 of Jefferson County’s 250,000 residents either still were here or had returned. Overall, he said, 500,000 people were about get desperately short of supplies.
Griffith urged those here to leave and those who evacuated to stay where they were.
Griffith discussed the possibility people would be allowed in over the weekend to clean out their refrigerators, but Crystal Holmes, a spokeswoman for the Beaumont Police Department, said she was not sure how they would get the people to leave again.
The people there Monday were working to clean the debris and answer questions from neighbors wondering about their homes. Trees fell in every neighborhood, on every street. Almost every yard had a tree down, it was just a matter of whether the tree hit the house or not.
Andrea Neild and her family already had cleared two dumptrucks of debris from their yards on East Lucas Drive with the help of their backhoe. The Neild family fled the storm but converged on Beaumont from points all over Texas as soon as Rita passed.
Since they returned Saturday they had seen people at night with flashlights who turned them off when police cars came up the road.
Holmes said looting had been sporadic and she classified it as “looting for greed,” rather than for food and other essential supplies.
Gerald Flatten said he would hold up forever. He had plenty of gasoline and food, a snub-nosed revolver strapped to his hip and a ton of trees to cut up to keep him busy.
Flatten was good natured about his predicament, but no less determined to ride out the recovery as well as the storm.
“I didn’t want my stuff here all alone,” said Flatten, who hadn’t talked to his family, which evacuated, since Saturday.
He’s not fazed by the conditions in Beaumont.
“I reminds me of what it was like in the 50s,” he said. “It’s nice to be reminded how miserable you were growing up.”
Dennis Waller, who evacuated to Angleton to be with his sister, was cooking all his meat Saturday, but he was one of the few who was planning on leaving.
A lifelong resident of Bevil Oaks, a heavily wooded community of about 1,500 people 10 miles west of Beaumont, Waller had been through at least three major floods.
“I’m going to hang around for a while,” he said. “I’m just going to cook and anybody who wants to eat can come eat. Then I’m leaving.”
Shannon Cooley of Beaumont, whose childhood home in Bevil Oaks had flooded twice in the past, said he was leaving.
“I called my credit company and said I’m not making a payment. I don’t know if I have a job, I know I don’t have a bank account right now, and I said ‘please don’t cancel my card,’” Cooley said. “She said, Mr. Cooley, don’t worry about it.”
Cooley said he didn’t understand why people wanted to return.
“They’ll fight to get back to what?” he said.
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