Rita Rains Begin Lashing Gulf Coast

Rita rains begin lashing the Gulf Coast
Strong Category 3 storm threatens to level two Texas oil towns

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A fire rages in Galveston, Texas, as Hurricane Rita approaches the coast, one of at least three in the city’s historic Strand District of nightclubs, shops and restaurants.

Updated: 12:52 a.m. ET Sept. 24, 2005

HOUSTON - Hurricane Rita lashed the Gulf Coast with rain and fierce winds Friday evening ahead of a destructive landfall expected early Saturday. The storm weakened, with sustained maximum winds slowing to about 120 mph, but experts said it could still strike a catastrophic blow to coastal communities and the oil-refining industry.

“Be calm, be strong, say a prayer for Texas,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in the state capital, Austin.

Even before the storm hit shore, it was creating havoc: The mass exodus of residents from the coastal area created monumental traffic jams along evacuation routes. As many as 24 people were killed when a bus carrying evacuees from a Houston retirement home burst into flames.

And the storm surge was taking a toll in areas previously ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. In rainy New Orleans, water poured over a patched levee, gushing into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods — the hard-hit and largely empty Ninth Ward — and heightening fears that Rita would flood the devastated city all over again.

At midnight ET, the storm center was about 50 miles southeast of Sabine Pass, Texas, at the border between Texas and Louisiana. It was moving northwest about 12 mph and was expected to come ashore early Saturday on a course that would slam the oil refining towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, La., with 20-foot storm surges, towering waves and up to 25 inches of rain.

“That’s where people are going to die,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. “All these areas are just going to get absolutely clobbered by the storm surge.”

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told MSNBC-TV: “If it’s 20 feet, there’s going to be horrific destruction in Port Arthur [and] Galveston. Most of Port Arthur would be underwater.”

Catastrophe predicted for Port Arthur
Jack Colley, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said Port Arthur was likely to suffer a "catastrophic" flood. Mayor Oscar Ortiz ordered a mandatory evacuation and said 95 percent of residents had left.

Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McGraw said Rita could also leave Beaumont underwater. He said the storm was likely to leave damage in as many as 19 counties, affecting up to 11 million Texans. The state’s emergency management coordinator, Jack Colley, predicted that Rita would cause $8.2 billion in damage.

President Bush, who was criticized for a slow federal response to Katrina, aborted a planned trip to Texas to view the emergency preparations Friday. Instead, he went to Colorado Springs, where he was monitoring the storm’s progress from U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base.

Federal officials declared a public health emergency Friday for Texas and Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Rita’s strike, even as they continued to urge people to get to safety or hunker down if it was too late to leave.

At least 2.8 million people fled a 500-mile stretch of the Louisiana-Texas coastline in a seemingly all-at-once evacuation that caused monumental traffic jams in which hundreds of cars broke down or ran out of gasoline. By midday Friday, the bumper-to-bumper traffic had cleared from the outskirts of Houston toward Austin and Dallas.

Chemical, fuel industries threatened
Scores of petrochemical plants are along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast in the nation’s biggest concentration of oil refineries, and damage and disruptions caused by Rita could cause already-rising oil and gasoline prices to go even higher. Environmentalists, meanwhile, warned of the possibility of a toxic spill.

Plants shut down operations, and hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs. Perry said state officials had been in contact with plants about “taking appropriate procedures to safeguard their facilities.”

At 11 p.m. ET, Rita’s maximum sustained wind was 120 mph, down from 175 mph on Thursday, according to the National Hurricane Center. That made Rita a Category 3 storm, downgraded from a fearsome Category 4. But Mayfield said it was still deadly, “probably reminiscent of Hurricane Audrey in 1957,” which killed 425 people along the Gulf Coast.

Rita’s hurricane-force winds extended up to 85 miles from the center, and its tropical storm-force winds reached outward 205 miles, meaning Houston and Galveston might not feel Rita’s full fury but could still be battered.

A hurricane warning was in effect from Sargent, Texas, to Morgan City, La.

Two towns set for a direct hit
The two communities that stood to bear the brunt of the storm were Beaumont, which is a petrochemical, shipbuilding and port city of about 114,000 people, and Port Arthur, a city of about 58,000 whose industries include oil, shrimping and crawfishing.

The offshore gulf region produces a third of U.S. oil. The closings raised to at least 13 the number of U.S. refineries out of commission from Katrina and Rita, which have shut 29 percent of U.S. refining capacity and raised the specter of serious gasoline shortages in the days ahead.

Exxon Mobil said it was closing its Baytown facility, the largest U.S. oil refinery, and one in Beaumont, 90 miles east.

It was in Beaumont that the Spindletop well erupted in a 100-foot gusher in 1901, giving rise to such giants as Gulf, Humble and Texaco.

The military sent cargo planes to evacuate thousands of patients and others from Beaumont. Downtown Beaumont was all but deserted, with buildings boarded up and practically nothing moving but windblown plastic bags. On the horizon, covered in gray clouds, refinery torches belched black smoke.

In Port Arthur — a down-on-its-luck town with a largely poor population of minorities, including Vietnamese shrimp fishermen, and a downtown museum devoted to one of its most famous natives, Janis Joplin — streetlights were turned off. Stores were boarded up along with the homes, many of which sit up on cinderblocks.

The usually bustling tourist island of Galveston — which was rebuilt after as many as 12,000 people died in a 1900 hurricane that is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history — was all but abandoned, with at least 90 percent of its 58,000 residents cleared out.

A woman was in critical condition after a large fire broke out Friday night in downtown Galveston, engulfing three buildings and sending flames shooting into the sky. Its cause was not immediately known.

Winds of 60 to 70 mph pushed the flames across roofs of other nearby buildings, and sparks tumbled down on firefighters, forcing them to stay well back from the buildings.

National Guard struggles in Louisiana
In Louisiana, the National Guard was trying to position its forces to respond but was frustrated by the hurricane’s erratic movement, said Maj. Ed Bush, a spokesman.

“Everybody is watching the path of the storm, and we’ve seen it wiggle and wobble and do a few other things,” he said.

David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “I don’t think anyone in the Gulf Coast is out of harm’s way.”

To the east, Mississippi declared a state of emergency because of Rita’s changing path and the possibility that it could bring heavy rains, flooding and tornadoes.

The government had already moved some emergency medical supplies to Texas, but Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a public health emergency to ease some of the requirements for hurricane victims who seek Medicaid or other assistance after the storm, a spokesman said.