San Antonio Prepares for Hurricane Evacuees

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many cities have re-evaluated their plans for dealing with natural disasters. The inland city of San Antonio, TX is no different, other than it lies over 100 miles from the nearest coastline. What San Antonio is prepared for, more than bad weather, is the influx of refugees fleeing coastal areas that are being threatened by landfall of a major storm.

During the evacuation of New Orleans in 2005, Interstate Highway 10 became an impassable mess due to the much higher rate of traffic than normal. IH 10 is just barely capable of handling the normal, day-to-day, traffic that it sees in Houston; add to that several thousand cars fleeing Louisiana, and the traffic snarl was unavoidable.

Since Hurricane Katrina, South Texas has become aware of the fact that it may play an important role in sheltering and caring for evacuees. Many of the major cities and counties of South Texas got together to develop an evacuation plan that moves traffic inland, towards San Antonio. In the event of a large scale evacuation from the Houston or Corpus Christi areas, all traffic on IH 10 (for Houston) and IH 37 (Corpus Christi) will be routed towards San Antonio. The main lanes of the highways will all be running into San Antonio. There will be no going east on IH 10 or south on IH 37. The Harris County (Houston) Homeland Security and Emergency Management has a map of the IH 10 traffic rerouting.

After the decision was made to move evacuees to San Antonio, the city of San Antonio had to figure out what to do with them once they got there. In 2005, the old Brooks Air Force base was used to house evacuees from Louisiana and, to a lesser degree, Mississippi. While the number of evacuees housed in San Antonio varies greatly, depending on the source, a reasonable estimate would be 25,000. As of this writing, Brooks AFB (now Brooks City Base) is still available for housing.