BEAUMONT, Texas -- Southeast Texas emergency officials staged National Guard trucks and hundreds of ambulances within easy reach as they waited for Hurricane Gustav to make landfall somewhere along the northern Gulf Coast on Monday.

Ahead of the storm, residents of the region who remembered the nightmares of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita three years ago wasted little time packing up and heading inland.

Gustav, like Katrina, appeared to be headed for Louisiana but a hurricane warning extended to just east of High Island, Texas and inland tropical storm warnings were issued for counties north of the Texas coast. Rita swamped the flat marshland and homes in southeast Texas with several feet of water.

For much of Sunday, streets were mostly empty in Port Arthur, Sabine Pass, Orange and Beaumont—areas hit hard by Rita. Orange County officials issued a dusk to dawn curfew for those who didn’t leave.

Authorities with the Southeast Texas Emergency Management Office evacuated some 6,000 people from a three-county area surrounding Beaumont and extending to the Louisiana-Texas state line. Evacuees included people with medical needs and those who couldn’t afford to evacuate, said Crystal Holmes, a spokeswoman for the agency. By evening, some local hospitals were also evacuating patients.

While neighborhoods were mostly empty, some people chose to wait to make a decision to leave or bet that the risk posed by Gustav did not outweigh the hassle of evacuating.

Just about everyone who walked into The Boudain Hut for lunch Sunday told busy waitress Donna Rider it was the only place open in Port Arthur. In a subtle display of dark humor, the jukebox broke the low din of lunch-time conversations with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s song “Texas Flood.”

Ernie Crochet, 48, kept an eye on the television between shots at the pool table.

“We’re going to see what it looks like at 6 a.m.,” Crochet said. His main concern was his parents who are in their 70s. An evacuation would be hard on them, so he wanted to be sure.

Salvador Vasquez, 34, was one of those planning to ride out the storm in Port Arthur. While loading plywood into his truck at a Port Neches home improvement store, Vasquez said evacuating his group of 15 family members and friends would be too expensive.

“We didn’t have an opportunity to evacuate,” Vasquez said in Spanish, adding that he had to work earlier in the week.

Those lined up at the Port Arthur civic center for free bus rides out of the coastal area showed up with everything from duffel bags to laundry sacks loaded with whatever they could carry, recalling that they couldn’t come home for weeks after Rita.

Kevin Paul, 30, said Rita helped him and his family decide to flee.

“You’ve got to think about how bad Rita messed up Port Arthur,” Paul said as he and two women in his group stood outside the city’s civic center waiting for one of the buses that would carry them to Texarkana, some 270 miles to the north.

Paul said his family came back to “nothing” after Rita slammed into the region, where some people still live with the now-familiar blue tarps over their roofs.

“The public heeded the warning,” Port Arthur Police Chief Mark Blanton said. “Last time we were still fighting people who didn’t heed warnings.”

Farther south, just a few miles from the gulf, Sabine Pass was ghostly quiet.

Margie McCray, 69, her husband and two adult children hurriedly packed their cars, stuffing entire wardrobes on hangers into the trunk. But then it wouldn’t start and they had to get a jumpstart.

Rita destroyed their home with currents of water that ruined its contents and blew out its windows. Three years later they are still renting a home and waiting to rebuild.

The lesson from Rita: Take more belongings, McCray said.

“We lost everything,” she said. “We only took two suits of

clothes because we thought we’d be right back.”

Phillip Purghan, 49, was planning to go 12 miles up to Port Arthur, thinking Gustav would not be that bad.

It took him a year to gut and restore his home after Rita and it was only finished that soon because of the help he received from a Dallas Methodist church and a group of Mennonites.

“That’s part of living on the coast,” he said.