The response to Rita has been better than Katrina. FEMA is pre-positioning supplies and the National Guard and Coast Guard are getting units staged and communication equipment ready. But we obviously haven’t learned enough. The Texas Highway Department didn’t reverse the highways until Thursday — several hours after evacuation orders had been given. As a result, the traffic was at a complete standstill and people are finding themselves stranded after their cars ran out of gas because a three hour trip turned into a 20 hour trip. There are apparently no provisions for moving people or for re-supplying them with fuel. And now we find out that the state and FEMA have no plan to evacuate everyone in the affected areas:

“I done called for a shelter, I done called for help. There ain’t none. No one answers,” she said, standing in blistering heat outside a check-cashing store that had just run out of its main commodity. “Everyone just says, ‘Get out, get out.’ I’ve got no way of getting out. And now I’ve got no money.”

With Hurricane Rita breathing down Houston’s neck, those with cars were stuck in gridlock trying to get out. Those like Skinner poor, and with a broken-down car were simply stuck, and fuming at being abandoned, they say.

“All the banks are closed and I just got off work,” said Thomas Visor, holding his sweaty paycheck as he, too, tried to get inside the store, where more than 100 people, all of them black or Hispanic, fretted in line. “This is crazy. How are you supposed to evacuate a hurricane if you don’t have money? Answer me that?”

Some of those who did have money, and did try to get out, didn’t get very far.

Judie Anderson of La Porte, Texas, covered just 45 miles in 12 hours. She had been on the road since 10 p.m. Wednesday, headed toward Oklahoma, which by Thursday was still very far away.

“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They say, ‘We’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina.’ Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”

On Bellaire Boulevard in southwest Houston, a weeping woman and her young daughter stood on the sidewalk, surrounded by plastic bags full of clothes and blankets. “I’d like to go, but nobody come get me,” the woman said in broken English. When asked her name, she looked frightened. “No se, no se,” she said: Spanish for “I don’t know.”

It’s pretty obvious that Texas and FEMA have not learned nearly enough from the failures of Katrina