Since either side scored higher than others, another round of finger pointing started. The Left accused the Right for not protecting the environment outside of the city of New Orleans which served as a natural buffer zone for strong hurricanes. The Right held their usual position to simply point out environmental changes would have mattered little, because the city of New Orleans had always been in a geographically precarious spot that was much lower than the sea level. They also pointed out that there had been many floods in the history of the city and suggested people to rebuild the city in a higher spot.

Eventually, both sides agreed that there were plenty of blames to go around. Therefore a poor guy named Mike Brown was quickly fired, because he made a few statements on TV saying the federal government was doing as much as they could and therefore doing a "good job". The agency he worked for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was also ridiculed ruthlessly. One rightwing radio talk show host said the name FEMA was too feminine, didn't sound like having enough power to do anything. Therefore he jokingly wanted to start a federal crisis management agency in a different way. He wanted to first come up with a name such as MACHO as an agency name, and asked audiences to call and help figure out what the agency would eventually stand for. Eventually he selected the explanation of the abbreviation MACHO as "maybe Ala can help out" from a caller's suggestion.

Despite of all the arguments going on in the media, most of the Houstonians quietly and voluntarily started helping out evacuees from New Orleans. Everyday, when returning to the hotel, David noticed more and more vehicles in the parking lot started appearing with Louisiana plates until two thirds of the lot were filled with them. Those people stayed for long term, just like he did and they are the relatively wealthier ones who left the city quicker or the ones got government sponsorship sooner. Many other evacuees were not so lucky and still gathered around the Reliant Stadium and waiting to get help financially and administratively to start a new life in Houston or elsewhere from that point onwards. Financially, Katrina victims were eligible to receive money to help on renting or staying in hotels temporarily. Administratively, many non-for-profit organizations went to Houston to give medical or consoling help to the victims and some also organized them to find new homes in other areas of the country. When it was weekend, David went to Reliant stadium to be a volunteer along with hundreds of others and often saw there were usually three or four times more volunteers in supplies than demands. He started to believe what Bud Westwood had been telling him all along that Houston really was a nice city. As a matter of facts, that was how most of the American cities look like. Average people were usually very nice and friendly, especially when natural disasters struck their neighbors. David saw similar long lines of volunteers along Ohio River in Cincinnati, Mississippi River near St. Louis and now in Houston.

Unfortunately, the international image of the US was simply a stark contrast to any average people could be seen in the volunteering line, so when he told some Canadians "Average Americans are usually more polite than you guys", several Canadians jumped on him. President George W. Bush once said "we are really nice people", the clip was played over and over again on Canadian TV screen as a mockery and a joke. But to majority of the people who had ever lived in America, they invariably felt it was not a joke and felt sad for such a bad choice of statesmanship for anybody to make such a statement. American people are generally nice to strangers for two reasons. One is a widely held belief about themselves, widely believed by other peoples of the world too: America is so rich with everything; they usually do not need to be nasty to each other in order to fight for a small amount of food or clothing (仓廪食而民知礼节). Another reason is because American had been peaceful for so many years and people had learned to be polite to one another for so long, at least superficially, majority of them had got the habit of being nice to people.

All the hurt feelings and hardship seemed to have settled down a little, when another Hurricane was gradually forming in the Gulf of Mexico. This one was called Rita and from all indications it was going to be a category V heading towards Houston, TX and would have leveled Galveston on its way. With recent memory of the Hurricane Katrina, flooding and looting scenes vivid in Houstonian's mind, the city was visibly shaken and stirred. Government officials and employers were not taking any chances this time and encouraged average Houstonians to prepare themselves for the worst as early as possible. It seemed every Burrito House employee's routine was interrupted as well, interrupted by management requests to fortify different office and restaurant locations all over the city. Residents swarmed to local grocery stores to stack up non-perishable food, bottled water and healthcare supplies. While on their way to various places, they also noticed other people were storing gasoline in plastic cans or in any other reasonably usable containers they could find. More and more people started stocking gasoline as well. Very soon, almost all the gas stations in Houston area started having lineups of automobiles.

Although the scene in the streets looked much worse than normal, David felt Houstonians performed superbly well considering the circumstances. After all, the city was a place with ample supplies, large buffering capacities and a wide urban sprawl. There were plenty of food, water and fuels for people who were driving around looking for them. Except some complaints, impatience and crazy driving close to gas stations, there were really no visible violence or even quarreling anywhere. To be totally objective, the chaotic scene in Houston was much better than the experiences David used to have when trying to buy train tickets to go home for Spring Festival holidays while he attended university in China. But that was only Wednesday.

More and more hurricane pictures were appearing on TV, with predicted tail span, eyes and the points of touchdown. It appeared that Rita was going to wipeout Galveston and then sweep through Houston on Saturday morning. David's hotel manager started passing out leaflets about how to secure the hotel rooms and how to survive the days after a major hurricane. One of the advices was to store a full tub of water in the bath tub, just in case clean waters would run out after the disaster. Next door, evacuees from New Orleans felt they were victims again because they would need to evacuate to another strange city further north or further west. They were not taking Rita lightly after suffering from Katrina.

Thursday morning, there were still long lineups outside of almost every gas station David passed on his way to work, but it seemed the lines were much shorter. It also seemed there were much fewer cars driving on local streets and it was much, much quieter, because birds usually disappeared early from the sky, if an area was going to be struck by hurricanes. While continued on with his driving in the quiet morning sun, towards the Burrito House headquarter, David was suddenly awed by the spectacular image when passing the overhead bridge of highway I-45.

Like the biblical scene of Exodus from the movie "Ten Commandments", only ten times more stunning and real, he saw millions of people sitting in the traffic almost without move. To save gasoline, many of them turned off air-conditioning. Although this was only morning, the Houston temperature was already punishing if one did not stay in an air-conditioned confine. A few cars in front of and after David's simply stopped at the overhead bridge. Some people took out camcorders, not the improvised kind that came with a phone, as though they were prepared to take videos and started shooting the motionless elongated parking lot that used to be called interstate highway. There were also others simply using camera phones or video phones to record the slow moving traffic for only one or two shots.

When finally arriving at the office, David noticed a local flood and hurricane relationship map was posted on the wall at the office building entrance. With different colors highlighting regions with hurricane category numbers, the map meant if the hurricane were in category I, then Galveston would be affected. If it were category II, III, then more areas between Galveston and Houston would be affected including the area where NASA mission control center was. If the hurricane continue to gain power and became category IV, then half of the Greater Houston area south east of highway 59, would be affected. If the hurricane continued to grow into a "cat 5", then a large portion of Greater Houston would be affected by flood as well.

Wow! The image of a flood triggered many unhappy thoughts in David's mind especially in Houston. Imagining cars would float in the roads merely after heavy rains, the prospect of flood in such a flat city was not something to be toyed with. While David was still engrossed in his thoughts, Bob Sutton walked in and half yelled at him: "Still here, go home! What are you doing here today? Why do you even come? Are you supposed to fly back to Canada this weekend?" David said: "yes, but not until Friday night. And I'd better check with Bud. I haven't seen him today yet and he didn't ask me to go home". Bob said: "Bud is not going to be in today. The entire city is evacuating and this place is going to shutdown. There is nothing for you to do here anyway. You would not have network pretty soon".

Bud called shortly after and only told David to put his computers on his desk and get out of Houston immediately. He was already on his way to Dallas with his family and he told David to get advices from Terry to drive out of Houston locally to the airport. "Don't take highway" was what he said. It took his family four hours to move what used to take twenty minutes to move.

After getting directions from several delivery drivers, Terry showed David how to get on the Houston International Airport via JFK parkway instead of the usual highway 59. Then he also told David that Ruben had instructed him to park the company car in the concrete protected building, at the expense of Burrito House, instead of the usual outdoor parking lot. David moved all his computer equipment to the top of the desk as mandated by safety officers of Burrito House hoping it would not come down to that dire a scenario to rely on desks to save the computer workstations.

Outside, highways were parking lot while local roads were only roamed by low volume traffic. However, it seemed every gas station and highway entrances were turning into road blocks similar to how magnets radiating with magnetic fields. And the ill positioned cars fighting to advance every inch very much resembled iron dusts scattering under the influence of those magnetic fields. In order to avoid those road blocks, David was forced to turn into several residential areas to test his luck of getting around to the next stretch of the local streets that could possibly lead to JFK parkway. Many residents who determined to hunker down were fortifying their houses with big wooden boards covering window glasses. One neighbor was shouting at another "You did this all wrong, these are in perfect missile sizes, and when the hurricane comes, guess where they are going to fly into? The houses", pointing at bundles of small twigs cut down from a big tree by the neighbor.