I still remember Hurricane Rita like it was yesterday. A few weeks ago, I shared how Katrina shaped the way we responded to Rita, and why, without Katrina, the massive evacuation we saw in Texas may never have happened. You can read that article here.
Today, I want to look back on Rita with a different lens, how much forecasting and technology have advanced since 2005, and how human behavior under stress has hardly changed at all.
To set the stage: Katrina had just devastated New Orleans. The images of flooded neighborhoods and rooftop rescues were still vivid. Less than a month later, another monster storm, Rita, was in the Gulf. It was even stronger than Katrina, reaching 180 mph winds on September 21, 2005, at the time the most powerful storm ever seen in the Gulf and threatening Houston. The image below shows Rita at its peak strength.
20 years ago, hurricane tracking looked very different. The tools we rely on today: spaghetti plots, side-by-side model comparisons, and easy access to American and European forecasts, simply didn’t exist in 2005. Back then, the National Hurricane Center’s Cone was the only graphic available.
The challenge? Social science research then and now shows that many people don’t fully understand what the cone represents. Below is the forecast issued on September 21, 2005.
The cone simply shows the probable track of the storm’s center. Two-thirds of the time, the center will stay inside the cone. One-third of the time, it won’t. That was true in 2005, and it’s still true today. The difference is that forecasting has improved, so the cone is much narrower now than it was back then.
Take a look at the forecast cones for Rita on September 21 and 22, 2005. What catches your eye first? Probably the center line, aiming straight toward southeast Texas. But here’s the problem: that line wasn’t the forecast; the cone was. The storm could have made landfall anywhere from Corpus Christi to Lafayette, Louisiana.
If you understood the cone, it was actually a good forecast, but most of us focused on the center line, not the cone. After Rita, I removed the center line from all my forecast tracks, and soon after, the National Hurricane Center did the same. That single line suggested a level of certainty that simply didn’t exist.
In a future post, I’ll break down what the line represents and why understanding it matters.
When people saw that center line, panic set in, and not just along the coast; social media didn’t exist in 2005, but email did. I received thousands of messages from people in Katy, Tomball, The Woodlands, and even Conroe, all asking the same thing: "Should we evacuate?" There were too many to respond to, so we focused on answering as many as we could on TV.
Amid the chaos and lack of sleep, I didn’t save any of our forecasts. I wish I had. At the time, we had just started using Baron radar software. Hidden in the system was a simple futurecast tool that showed Rita moving east into Louisiana. It wasn’t perfect; the storm showed up as a blob, but it suggested an alternative to the dreaded center line. Still, people kept evacuating.
Years later, a Rice University study confirmed what we lived through: it didn’t matter what emergency managers, elected officials, or meteorologists said. Once people saw their neighbors packing up, they followed. We lost control of the message. For a meteorologist, there’s no worse feeling.
Looking back, it’s almost surreal to imagine entire neighborhoods in Cypress, Spring, and Kingwood sitting empty, not because they were told to leave, but because of fear. And that’s why we have images like this.
Unbelievable numbers:
Before Rita, evacuation behavior was fairly predictable. Typically, about 70% of people in evacuation zones leave, while only around 15% outside those zones go.
Rita was different. This time, 90% of those in evacuation zones left, but so did 1.5 million people outside of those zones, more than half of the total evacuees!
And it wasn’t just the number of people evacuated, but how they evacuated.
- 47% of evacuee households reported leaving with more than one vehicle.
- 60% of evacuees from areas under an evacuation order left with more than one vehicle.
- 40% not under an evacuation order left with more than one vehicle.
The result? Gridlock. Highways were jammed for hours. Families became stranded on the roadside. And while contraflow, reversing lanes to move traffic in one direction, was supposed to help, in many cases, it only made the situation worse.
That’s why we saw scenes like this.
I’m not usually a fan of “what if” scenarios; they’re rarely productive. But 20 years later, I think it’s fair to ask: “What if Rita had made a direct hit?"
The graphic below shows the wind speeds southeast Texas would have faced in that scenario, alongside the actual landfall location.
What stands out to me is this: our western cities would have taken on winds similar to Hurricane Beryl last year.
We all remember the damage Beryl did to trees, roofs, and power lines. Now imagine adding 110 to 140 mph winds stretching from the coast all the way to the Beltway. Even Huntsville would have been dealing with 90 to 110 mph winds.
And here’s something we often forget: as bad as the evacuation was, the day before Rita made landfall, the roads were empty. No one was still in traffic. See below:
The lessons learned from Rita:
There was a lot of frustration after Rita made landfall near the Texas–Louisiana state line, leaving much of southeast Texas largely untouched.
I remember people telling me, “I’ll never evacuate again.” But when Hurricane Ike threatened Houston three years later, many did evacuate, and that evacuation went far more smoothly. We learned an important lesson: run from the water, hide from the wind. Most people outside evacuation zones stayed put.
Here’s my advice: If you live in an evacuation zone and officials tell you to leave, you must go. Storm surge is never something to gamble with.
If you’re outside the evacuation zone, the decision is more personal. Consider your family’s needs. Do you have someone on oxygen who can’t be without power? A loved one with special needs who can’t risk a long disruption? Those kinds of dynamics matter as much as wind speed or rainfall totals.
I’d love to hear your memories of Rita. Feel free to email me at ayanez@kprc.com or share your story below.