After brushing by the southern tip of Florida just last weekend, Hurricane Rita plunged into the Gulf of Mexico and has been gaining strength ever since. With landfall predicted to be square in the middle of the Texas coastline, people everywhere have already started leaving the area. The island of Galveston has already been under mandatory evacuation orders since yesterday, and all reports show that the island is virtually lifeless.

Here in Houston, about 50 miles away, the sense of panic is growing stronger every hour. Yesterday, I left work to start picking up supplies like water and batteries and such. I came away empty-handed. Items were flying off the shelves just as fast as they were stocked.

I’m still not sure about whether I should just up and leave. There are so many things to consider. Since we have two children, the possibility of being without power for extended periods, flooding or even damage to our house could make things really complicated. I know that cellular service has been spotty in the last 24 hours and traffic around town has grown to monumental proportions. Reading the news, it would seem that this is possibly the worst storm in recent history, dwarfing Hurricane Katrina that devastated Louisiana and Mississippi just three weeks ago.

But when I look around the neighborhood, I don’t see anyone boarding up their windows, I don’t see anyone packing up and leaving. In fact, on the way home today, I saw people at a park, sitting by a pond talking. I saw people riding their bikes down the street. I saw people going to restaurants.

One thing I heard on the radio was that the fact that it’s been sunny and hot all week might be misleading people into a false sense of security. But is there really anything to panic about? Could we just be overreacting in light of what happened with Katrina? Or is this a real threat that could endanger thousands of lives?

UPDATE - As everyone should know by now, Rita managed to not only calm herself, but miss Houston almost entirely, bringing us nothing more than a little wind and rain. Unfortunately, lives were still lost, including the 23 people on a bus that exploded on the way to Dallas. Most of the deaths were actually attributed to the heat and traffic during the evacuation before the storm even made landfall.