A family who helped a frantic mother find her two Bermudian teenage sons stranded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have now been forced to flee their home because of Hurricane Rita.

Catherine Robinson, who has family in Bermuda, was described by Bermudian Jean La Montagne as a phenomenal person who offered her a place to stay for free in order for her to search shelters in Texas for her boys.

Less than a week after the Thomas brothers returned to the Island with their mother, Mrs. Robinson and her husband James were on a packed highway out of Houston and described her ordeal, which included a shortage of water, fuel and food in the mad-rush to leave Texas.

??We will be okay, we got out. I had four hours sleep last night. We just headed out. Pray for all us Americans here,? Mrs. Robinson said yesterday. ?We have headed out of Houston and are on Highway 59 in traffic at three to five mph. We are trying to get to north-east Texas 167 miles from Dallas.?

She said the drive that normally takes four to five hours, was now taking 12 to 14 hours in temperatures of up to 100 degrees.

Although the Texas Governor had ordered an evacuation for Houston yesterday Mrs. Robinson said many people were waiting for traffic on the highways to thin out.

The Robinson?s themselves only set out yesterday morning, she said.

Some evacuees were driving to Austin, Texas, in order to beat queues to Dallas, which she said was a long way to reach the city.

?All the freeways are crowded,? she said. ?You can imagine what we are going through.?

Comparing Houston with 5.1 million inhabitants to New Orleans with 1.2 million the traffic jams were worse than when Katrina struck on August 29.

She said they ran out of gasoline and very few stations had any.

Those stations which did have gasoline had massive lines behind them, only to be told there was ?not going to be any more gas brought in? to the region, she said.

She decided not to refill her car at one Exxon station, but found it had ran out overnight.

At a Walmart she shopped at all the water had been sold.

?There was not too much left,? she said. ?A truck had to bring water in and we lined up.

While on a mobile phone call to Bermuda, she saw a woman at the side of the road with a garden hose selling water.

?It?s a paperboard sign written in crayon that says water,? she said. ?She is turning the water hose on.?

Mrs. Robinson has a niece, nephew and sister-in-law in Bermuda, Rose Vickers and David and Shanea Strong.

?We have taken this hurricane very seriously,? she said. ?People are not waiting like they did in New Orleans.?