'Potentially Catastrophic' Rita Forces Evacuations
Slight Weakening Anticipated Today
September 22, 2005
By Sylvia Moreno, Blaine Harden, Ceci Connolly and Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
GALVESTON, Tex. -- Hurricane Rita, a "potentially catastrophic" Category 5 hurricane with destructive force equal to the might of Hurricane Katrina, churned through the Gulf of Mexico early Thursday toward the Texas coast, prompting evacuation orders for more than 1.1 million Texans and the few remaining holdouts in flood-ravaged New Orleans.
Thousands of citizens streamed out of the Houston area Thursday, creating miles of traffic back-ups in the country's fourth largest city. In an unprecedented move, city officials announced they would reverse the flow of the city's freeways to clear the horrendous traffic jams that had developed, with motorists moving only a few miles forward all through the night. Long lines formed at gas stations in the area too.
Hurricane Rita slapped at Key West on Tuesday before strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico, where it appeared to be veering away from New Orleans, but still forced the evacuation of 7,000 of Louisiana's Katrina evacuees from Texas.
Galveston, a coastal city of 60,000, seemed like a ghost town Thursday morning, with much of it boarded up with big sheets of plywood.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami, in its latest advisory at 8 a.m. EDT, said Rita's winds had reached 170 mph with higher gusts, making it a Category 5 storm, the highest ranking used by the National Hurricane Center. Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 70 miles from the massive hurricane's eye and tropical storm winds extend up to 185 miles outward, the advisory said.
The Hurricane Center said, however, that a "slight weakening" in the monster hurricane's strength was anticipated Thursday.
Houston Mayor Bill White urged residents of low-lying areas to quickly evacuate.
"If your neighborhood has flooded before, you should evacuate this city," White said in a televised press conference. "What you do not want to do is wait until Friday afternoon when the storm surge wind comes. Don't wait. The time for warnings is over."
The storm is forecast to hit land near Galveston late Friday or early Saturday. Its path shifted a bit north overnight, meteorologists said. The National Hurricane Center said it is expected to smash into the Texas coast at least as a Category 3 storm.
Rita's atmospheric pressure at its center is dangerously low, at 907 millibars in the latest advisory, according to the National Hurricane Center. The lower the pressure in the center of a hurricane, the stronger the storm.
Katrina, which was once a Category 5 storm but came ashore as a Category 4 with 140-mph winds, had a pressure of 923 millibars when it made landfall.
In Texas, authorities ordered mandatory evacuations in Galveston and parts of Houston, which is just miles from the mouth of Galveston Bay. Galveston was the scene of the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history when an unnamed storm killed 8,000 to 10,000 people in 1900. New Orleans was also under a mandatory evacuation order.
Authorities in New Orleans warned that even as little as a few inches of rain could cause a breach in the city's damaged levees, flooding neighborhoods that remain coated in a crusty layer of muck. A tropical storm watch is in effect for the southeastern coast of Louisiana to the mouth of the Mississippi River near New Orleans, meaning tropical storm conditions are expected in the area during the next 24 hours.
Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. oil refiner, and other oil producers were closing refineries in anticipation of the storm. The Texas Gulf Coast -- the heart of U.S. oil production -- has seven of the 13 largest U.S. refineries, accounting for about one-quarter of the nation's total crude oil production. After suffering sizable losses in Katrina, several oil refineries shut down Wednesday, pulling hundreds of workers from rigs off the Texas shore.
Some 1,000 state troopers were staged near the Gulf Coast, while dozens of shelters prepared for evacuees in Austin, Lufkin, College Station-Bryan, San Antonio and Huntsville. In Austin, which just three weeks ago took in 4,000 Katrina evacuees, 50 shelters were being opened to house as many as 15,000 Texas Gulf Coast evacuees.
President Bush declared states of emergency in Texas and Louisiana. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) urged residents along a 250-mile swath, from Beaumont to Corpus Christi, to leave.
"I urge the citizens to listen carefully to the instructions provided by state and local authorities, and follow them," Bush said during a speech in Washington. "We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we've got to be ready for the worst."
Painful memories of Katrina -- with a death toll that reached 1,000 Wednesday -- drove thousands of private citizens and elected officials to act fast rather than take the wait-and-see approach that greeted some coastal storms in recent years.
"If Katrina did anything, it woke people up to the power of Mother Nature," said Anthony Griffin, 51, who spent Wednesday boarding up his Galveston law office before heading to his brother's home in Fort Worth. "When Katrina hit this country, it was in a city that everyone knew and those folks looking at the TV camera looked like folks we knew."
The Department of Defense, taking lessons from Katrina, intends to send surveillance aircraft soon after Rita strikes land to "determine the magnitude of the relief required and, secondly, where it would be required," Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said Wednesday. "We want to ensure as a matter of policy we have better eyes on target."
Already, about 5,000 Texas National Guard troops have been mobilized and another 1,300 who had been assisting in New Orleans are returning from Louisiana. The Pentagon is drawing up plans to assist local law enforcement "in the event that the first responders become the first victims," as happened in Katrina, he said. "The National Guard MP [military police] response to Katrina was nothing short of extraordinary, but it was a response that was formulated on the fly as we recognized an emerging law enforcement requirement," he said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency positioned 45 truckloads of water and ice and 25 truckloads of Meals Ready to Eat at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. More than 400 medical workers and 14 urban search-and-rescue teams, comprising 744 people, have been stationed in Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.
FEMA also asked the Pentagon to provide 26 helicopters to ferry people and supplies, five two-person communications teams for first responders, temporary hospital beds for 2,500 patients and field kitchens capable of serving 500,000 meals a day.
Moreno and Harden reported from Galveston. Connolly reported from New Orleans. Deane reported from Washington.
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