Hurricane Rita struck western Louisiana and Texas on September 24, 2005, after widespread pre-storm evacuations had filled roads across the region. The storm’s approach produced a disaster of its own: a bus carrying elderly residents from Brighton Gardens of Bellaire caught fire on the way to Dallas, killing 23 of the 38 people aboard. Houston, the city near the nursing home, was spared. In the book, Rita’s aftermath complicates the assumption that evacuation is always the safer choice, and changes how the earlier decision at St. Rita’s Nursing Home is judged.

Evacuation and Its Risks

Unlike the response to Hurricane Katrina, Rita prompted widespread evacuations before landfall. But the roads clogged in the storm’s projected path, making the movement of vulnerable people hazardous in practice as well as urgent in principle. The bus carrying residents from Brighton Gardens of Bellaire was chartered to take them to a sister facility in Dallas. It had an illegal license, and its driver was an undocumented Mexican national. Oxygen tanks in the luggage bays exploded after the bus caught fire. Twenty-three elderly passengers died; the others survived.

The storm spared Houston, underscoring the uncertainty built into evacuation decisions: residents and institutions had to bear the risks of moving before knowing precisely where the storm would strike. Rita did not show that evacuation was unnecessary, but it made the costs of transport impossible to treat as hypothetical.

The Debate After St. Rita’s

The bus deaths resonated in the ongoing controversy over St. Rita’s Nursing Home, where the owners had chosen not to evacuate before Katrina. Their attorney, James A. Cobb Jr., had defended that decision publicly. After the Rita bus disaster, he argued that the deaths lent his clients’ choice greater plausibility. The Manganos, the nursing home’s owners, had stayed at St. Rita’s and tried to save residents; they had also surrendered after warrants accused them of negligent homicide for failing to evacuate.

Rita therefore changed the context in which the St. Rita’s case was being discussed without resolving the question of responsibility. The bus tragedy offered a concrete warning that evacuation itself could end in deaths, while the charges against the Manganos concerned the risks their residents faced by remaining. Neither outcome made the opposing danger disappear.

A Wider Pattern of Transport Hazards

The book places the Rita bus fire alongside earlier evacuation deaths that had drawn less attention. At Ferncrest Manor Living Center, three residents reportedly died during a pre-Katrina bus evacuation toward Baton Rouge. The buses lacked functioning air-conditioning and drinking water, and some trips lacked nurses; residents spent hours boarding and traveling through congested roads, while survivors were treated for dehydration. That account further unsettled any simple equation of movement with safety.

The contrast also sharpens the book’s broader picture of disaster vulnerability. People who depended on organized transport could not simply leave when ordered: their safety rested on vehicles, drivers, route conditions, and timely coordination. During Katrina, New Orleans residents without cars faced gaps in transportation plans, and ambulances were caught in traffic; later, the book describes disaster medical teams in Port-au-Prince confronting shortages in their oxygen supply. Rita’s bus disaster belongs to this recurring account of how evacuation and rescue depend on fragile systems as well as decisions.

Significance

Rita enters the narrative as both a separate catastrophe and a retrospective test of judgments made after Katrina. Its bus fire gave force to the argument that moving nursing-home residents could expose them to danger, while Houston’s reprieve made the scale and cost of evacuation especially stark. The event does not settle whether St. Rita’s should have evacuated. Instead, it reveals why such decisions cannot be judged solely by whether a facility stayed or left: the conditions of transport, the people available to move residents, and the uncertain path of a storm all shaped who bore the risk.