As Many as 24 Elderly Evacuees Killed in Bus Blaze on Texas Highway
In New Orleans, Water Floods Into City Over Patched Levee
September 23, 2005
By Daniela Deane and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Photo: Emergency crews help at the scene where a bus caught fire and exploded on northbound I-45 in Texas. (AP)
The evacuation of the U.S. Gulf Coast took a tragic turn today when a bus carrying elderly people fleeing Hurricane Rita caught fire on a gridlocked Texas highway, killing as many as 24 evacuees, according to television and wire service reports.
The bus exploded into flames on Interstate 45 south of Dallas and closed the highway, a major escape route out of the area already bumper-to-bumper with motorists trying to leave ahead of the monster hurricane. The bus fire caused a huge back-up on the interstate.
Meanwhile in New Orleans, where substantial rain was falling for the first time since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city three weeks ago, water poured over a patched levee, flooding into one of the city neighborhoods hardest hit by Katrina.
Dozens of blocks in New Orleans' Ninth Ward were under water as water rushed over part of the levee that previously was breached.
Col. Rich Wagenaar from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the water level had exceeded the height of the levee and could no longer be contained. He said repairs were hampered by deteriorating weather conditions, which made it impossible to put helicopters into the air.
The bus fire outside of Dallas came as authorities struggled to cope with one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history as Hurricane Rita, a Category 4 storm, barreled toward the Louisiana-Texas border.
"Deputies were unable to get everyone off the bus," The Associated Press quoted Dallas County Sheriff's Department spokesman Don Peritz as saying. Peritz said he believed 24 people out of the 45 on board were killed, but that number could change, according to the AP.
Television footage showed the charred shell of the bus surrounded by police cars and ambulances. Emergency personnel tended to the injured on stretchers. Peritz said the bus had been traveling since Thursday. He said the passengers were from a nursing home in Bellaire, an area of Houston.
Early indications, Peritz said, were that the fire started because of mechanical problems, which in turn caused passengers' oxygen tanks to explode. There were a series of explosions, he said.
"The driver did survive the accident," Peritz said. "It's my understanding he went back on the bus several times to try to evacuate people."
Traffic remained backed up for 50 to 100 miles this morning with motorists trying to evacuate the Galveston and Houston areas of Texas. TV aerial pictures showed a line of cars extending as far as the eye could see. Airports were jammed with people trying to leave as well.
In Beaumont, Tex., National Guard and Army units used military transport planes to evacuate hundreds of invalids from hospitals, nursing homes and private residences today, Washington Post staff writer Doug Struck reported.
Evacuees were brought to the regional airport in Beaumont, carried on stretchers and loaded onto baggage carts, eight to a cart. They were then driven to the back of a C-5 Galaxy transport plane, where soldiers wearing gloves carried them into the cavernous hold for a flight to Dallas. Other aircraft were bound for San Antonio and other cities.
As the evacuation continued, intensifying wind, rain and waves gave coastal regions of Texas and Louisiana a foretaste of the hurricane with the eye of the storm still about 260 miles southeast of Galveston, Tex., and expected to make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border early tomorrow.
A steady downpour fell on flood-ravaged New Orleans, forcing engineers to shore up broken levees.
In the lower Ninth Ward, where some of the worst flooding occurred after Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reported there was water a foot deep today in areas that previously were dry. The news agency quoted Chad Rachel, a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, as saying that the water level in the canal was rising and that "localized seepage" was inevitable.
Some parts of southeast Louisiana were getting hit with sustained winds of 55 mph and gusts of 65 mph this morning.
Tropical storm warnings were up for a massive area from the southeastern coast of Louisiana, including metropolitan New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain to Brownsville, Tex., encompassing populations of 2 million people as well as the heart of the nation's petroleum-producing and gasoline-refining center.
A portion of the affected area is just in the preliminary recovery stage from Hurricane Katrina, more than three weeks after it struck.
As of 8:00 a.m. EDT, Rita was moving toward the northwest at about 9 mph, with maximum sustained winds near 140 mph and higher gusts, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Rita changed direction overnight to northwest from west-northwest, and is forecast to hit just west of the Louisiana-Texas border early Saturday.
The storm is expected to slow significantly once making landfall, threatening the region with rain accumulations as high as 25 inches over the next several days. Coastal storm surge flooding of 15 to 20 feet is expected as well.
Current National Hurricane Center models show the storm track ultimately angling to the northeast after landfall, with hazardous conditions extending well into northeast Texas near the Arkansas border.
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