BEAUMONT - Most cities near the storm's path aren't taking chances. About 1.9 million people have evacuated from Louisiana and 6,000 have fled the Beaumont area.

In the region where Hurricane Rita swamped the flat marshland and homes with several feet of water three years ago, few people waited around for Hurricane Gustav or even the mandatory evacuation that began at 6 a.m. Sunday. Three counties were placed under a mandatory evacuation near the Gulf Coast in Texas.

While hurricanes affect everyone in the area, the past has shown that the poor suffered more because of a lack of transportation. Emergency planners don't want that to every happen again.

In a sign of lessons learned from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, emergency operations in southeast Texas arranged for city buses to pick up anyone who wanted to evacuate.

While Diane Frazier, of Beaumont, stayed for Rita, she and her family evacuated Sunday.

"It wasn't that nice," she said. "I had water in my apartment, and the apartment even shook and I don't think I could take another one."

Sunday, Lakesha Harris sat while waiting to leave with her children at the high school staging point. For her, the decision to leave was easy.

"I got two little kids," she said. "That's why I'm really leaving because anything could happen."

When evacuees signed in, they were each given a wrist band in order that they could be tracked in a statewide database to avoid splitting up fleeing families.

"But many lessons [were] learned in Rita," said Jeff McNeel, with the Beaumont Fire Department. "Even before then, lessons [were] learned as a host community when we got people from New Orleans with Katrina."

Even pets got tags and a ride. Eylissa Henry, the owner of a pit bull named "Red," said she refused to leave her pet behind.

"That's my child, so I need to take him with me," she said. "I'm worried about his life and safety just like everybody else is."

However, there were still holdouts.

While loading plywood into his truck at a Port Neches home improvement store, Salvador Vasquez, 34, said he was preparing to stay in Port Arthur. Evacuating his group of 15 family members and friends would be too expensive, he said.

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

Many of the people leaving Sunday were heading to shelters in the Tyler area. So far, about 2,000 people left on buses, and the operation was still running Sunday night.

The Associated Press contributed to this report