SA Shelters Filling Up Fast

SAN ANTONIO -- Evacuees of Hurricane Rita continued to arrive Friday in San Antonio by the hundreds per hour, officials said.

San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger said about 11,000 Hurricane Rita evacuees are in shelters in addition to 3,500 Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Hardberger and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff took a walking tour Friday of the KellyUSA shelter and visited with evacuees and volunteers.

Hardberger said he was impressed at the short amount of time it takes to get an evacuee settled into a shelter.

"We were ready," Hardberger said. "Our people are trained and everything has been pretty close to flawless."

Hardberger added had it not been for the experience San Antonio gained from the Hurricane Katrina evacuation, this week's evacuation could have been chaotic.

At least one of the local shelters, Windsor Park Mall, has run out of space. The Montgomery Ward building is housing 2,500 people.

Some evacuees from the Houston area arrived so fatigued following trips that took as long as 24 hours, that some families used a fast-food parking lot as a makeshift shelter, not realizing that the Red Cross reception area was less than two hours away.

Due to the high numbers of people having trouble finding the staging area at McCreless Mall, a spotlight was set up to guide people to the location at night.

Other Houston-area evacuees had to sleep in their vehicles at truck stops on Interstate 10 and Foster Road on the East Side after finding out that hotel rooms were not available.

The good news was that there was plenty of gasoline available at the truck stops and traffic congestion was reduced significantly from Thursday. At 11 a.m., the westbound lanes on Interstate 10 from Seguin to Sealy that were converted to eastbound lanes were changed back to westbound lanes.