Texas Booksellers Along the Gulf Coast Prepare for Rita

As yet another category five hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast -- this time in the Houston/Galveston area -- it is clear that most residents of coastal Texas towns have heeded the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people began a mass exodus from the area, which is expected to bear the brunt of 350-mile wide Hurricane Rita. The storm is expected to come ashore late Friday or early Saturday causing widespread damage along the Texas coastline and further inland.

On Thursday afternoon, Bookselling This Week spoke with several ABA members in the area who were busy preparing for Rita's arrival.

In Houston, a few booksellers noted that because so many people have heeded the evacuation order it's extremely tough to get out of the city now. And with late reports indicating that Rita might take a more eastward path than previously thought, for some booksellers, it has made the decision to avoid the traffic nightmare and stay home that much easier.

"They say they've never had a response to a Hurricane evacuation order like this," Michael Jones of Houston's River Oaks Bookstore told BTW. "They're saying it takes eight hours just to get out of the city limits."

Jones said that his building has been through many hurricanes in the past and has never suffered serious damage, so he plans to stay put. "We're fairly comfortable ... we just make sure we have no books on the floor."

Chris Duffy of R Duffy Booksellers, located north of Houston, reported, "It's taking 12 hours to get to Dallas, which is usually a three-and-a-half-hour drive. We're staying because we hate traffic." She noted that it's not just traffic on the I-45 that's at a standstill, but all over town, too. "My husband went to the shop this morning and with the [long] lines and traffic, he just said forget it, and came home. Home Depot has a line of pick-up trucks around the parking lot [as customers waited] to pick up plywood they had already bought, and there is a line to just get into the store."

To prepare for the storm, cardboard was placed over bookstore windows in rooms that house books, Duffy noted, and the remaining windows were taped up. In addition, "we cut down a couple of dead trees yesterday, so they wouldn't fall on anybody," she said.

In the far western Houston suburbs, Tamra Dore of Katy Budget Books was thankful that the hurricane's projected course shifted more easterly. "We won't know if we're out of harm's way until the storm lands, but it looks much better for us today than it did yesterday, when its path looked like it was going right through the community of Katy. If it keeps moving east then we probably will just have tropical storm level winds and rain, but hopefully they won't be at catastrophic levels."

Dore had planned to evacuate, but with the shift of trajectory, she decided to "wait and see." She said, "Yesterday we didn't want to go, but decided we'd be foolish not to. Today things look different, so at this moment we're not planning on leaving. Right now it's 12 hours to get out of the city anyway."

Meanwhile, Katy Budget Books is open. "The customers who've come in have been extremely grateful," said Dore. "Now that they have all of their supplies, they realize that if they lose power, they're going to need something to read."

John Wilson, at the Dallas headquarters of Half Price Books, which has 10 stores in Corpus Christi and Houston, said that all of the locations would be closed at least through the weekend. All stores were boarding up for the storm and removing books from the bottom shelves. Many of the stores are in the northern part of Houston where Wilson speculated they would be relatively undamaged. One of the Half Price locations, however, was in the direct path of the hurricane. "We just don't know what will happen," said Wilson. "They're taking extra precautions."

At Brazos Bookstore, Karl Kilian said, "We're just hoping the ceiling stays up and the water stays down." Kilian said that Brazos, in central Houston, would most likely fare relatively well, as opposed to coastal areas of the city that he said were more likely to "suffer a sad fate more similar to the that of New Orleans."

To prepare, Kilian was putting books up on tables and away from windows, and he was trying to locate as much plywood as possible, although it's in scarce supply. The good news was that the glass storefront faces north, and most hurricane winds are southerly, explained Kilian, who added that the southern side of the bookstore is a solid brick wall.

Kilian, who lives blocks from the store, planned on staying put and mitigating any post-Rita damage that he could. "We've had a storm of the magnitude before," he said. "And most of the damage came after the storm from the wakes of SUVs driving through the standing water and sending waves up to the store."

As bad luck would have it, said Kilian, Alexander McCall Smith was scheduled to do a signing over the weekend. The event was rescheduled for April 25, just about a month before the next hurricane season begins.

A telephone message left by Valerie Koehler of Houston's Blue Willow Bookshop informs callers that the store is closed and that she has evacuated, and Galveston's Midsummer Books was unreachable as well.

Homes and businesses on the outskirts of the hurricane's projected path are preparing to operate without electricity, according to BookPeople's Steve Bercu, who noted that the storm has already prompted one author to cancel a book signing at the Austin store.

The weather service was predicting the rain to begin on Friday evening and that there would be winds of 75 miles-per-hour on Saturday. "I would assume with 75 mile per hour winds, business won't be brisk," Bercu said.

Overall, Bercu said, "I have no expectations with what the reality of this might be." --David Grogan and Karen Schechner

Booksellers in disaster areas are reminded that ABA offers a number of resources to help them through the crisis. Information on the Bookseller Relief Fund, offers of housing and employment from others in the industry, and more are listed at ABA's Hurricane Resource Center at www.bookweb.org/hurricane/. To help the association help you, booksellers are asked to let us know how you are faring by contacting ABA's director of special projects, David Walker, at (800) 637-0037, ext. 6612 or at [email protected].