...By 8:30 a.m., volunteers were unloading and passing out crates of water, ice and nonperishable food supplied by the state, and were told that the federal government would soon be sending shipments.
More than 10,000 people had showed up by 10:30 a.m., FEMA spokeswoman Mary Bell Lunsford said.
``Oh, my goodness,'' said Charlene Matthews, 43, as she walked from her car toward the church, trying to catch a glimpse of the end of a line of pedestrians that wrapped around the building, along a stretch of sidewalk and down more than two city blocks. A separate line of waiting cars stretched for two miles.
Houston Police Lt. Spencer Coker, squinting in the sun in the church's makeshift loading area, said the long lines were largely due to initial news reports that listed the Greenspoint center as the only hub in the city open Monday morning.
``We'll do the best we can with what we've got,'' Coker said as the temperature climbed and police heard reports of people suffering from heat exhaustion, distribution trucks tied up in traffic and pregnant women requesting restrooms.
The wait time at 9 a.m. on Monday was roughly an hour and a half, and peaked at two to three hours before dropping to 50 minutes by 4 p.m.
But things were moving slowly in Fort Bend County, where officials expressed frustration when water and ice did not materialize.
"I'm frustrated, I'm very frustrated,'' County Judge Bob Hebert said Monday.The judge said the county put in a request with the state to get emergency shipments. "We were told a truck would arrive at 4 p.m. today in Sugar Land.'' He said volunteers manned the site. ``Four o'clock came and no truck.''
"We still haven't heard why it didn't arrive,'' he said.
When Fort Bend officials called a state command post they were told there was no record of the county filing a request.
Hebert said he can understand if the supplies have to be sent to other areas that got harder hit than his county, but ``we wish they would have told us so we could have secured our own supply.''
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6002679.html