Key West, Fla. – Residents boarded up windows today and evacuated the low-lying Florida Keys as Tropical Storm Rita gathered strength in the Bahamas, threatening to grow into a hurricane with a potential 8-foot storm surge.
Officials in New Orleans warned that there was a chance Rita could charge through the Gulf of Mexico and interfere with recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which also roared across South Florida. Oil prices surged on the possibility that the storm would interrupt oil and gas production.
The storm’s top sustained wind speed was 70 mph by midafternoon today and it was expected to strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane, with winds of at least 74 mph, by the time it got close to the Keys early Tuesday.
“The main concern now is the Florida Keys,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “It’s moving over very warm water and that’s extremely favorable for development.” Hurricane warnings were posted for the Keys and Miami-Dade County, the hurricane center said. Residents were ordered to evacuate the lower Keys and visitors were ordered to clear out of the entire chain of islands, connected by just one highway.
Voluntary evacuation orders were posted for some 134,000 Miami-Dade residents of coastal areas such as Miami Beach and Key Biscayne.
“This storm has some potential to it. The time to go is now,” said state emergency management director Craig Fugate.
While many Keys residents take pride in staying put during hurricanes, others said they were worried because of Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi. Most stores on Key West’s Duval Street were boarded up today and that and other streets were nearly empty as the sky turned cloudy.
“We’re going north, wherever the storm isn’t going,” John Williams said after he and Lisa Sparks got married this morning on the beach in Key West. They joked that if they had a baby girl they would name her Rita.
Rita is the 17th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, making this the fourth busiest season since record-keeping started in 1851. The record is 21 tropical storms in 1933. Six hurricanes have hit Florida in the last 13 months.
Gov. Jeb Bush said the highway patrol reported that traffic out of the Keys was moving well on U.S. 1. However, lines were forming at gas stations.
In the Bahamas, some public schools were closed as the storm worked its way up that chain of islands with wind and rain.
Six to 15 inches of rain was possible in the Keys, with 3 to 5 inches possible across southern Florida. A storm surge rising 6 to 9 feet above normal tide level was predicted for the Keys.
Long-range computer models, which can be off by hundreds of miles, projected that Rita could be in the northwest Gulf of Mexico near Mexico or Texas by the weekend, with a possibility that it could turn toward Louisiana. Katrina crossed South Florida into the Gulf last month before it slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi.
“This is something everyone should be paying attention to,” said Daniel Brown, a hurricane center meteorologist.
The man in charge of removing water from New Orleans and repairing levees warned that Rita could affect efforts to drain water out of the city.
“We’re watching Tropical Storm Rita’s projected path and, depending on its strength and how much rain falls, everything could change. Residents moving into the area may have to evacuate again,” Col. Duane Gapinski, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers Task Force Unwatering, said in a statement.
Crude-oil futures rose above $67 a barrel today, in part because of worries about Rita.
Chevron Corp. and Shell began evacuating employees from offshore oil- and gas-drilling platforms. Other companies were watching the storm’s track but had not yet begun evacuations.
“These storms are pretty big and broad sometimes, so you take no chances,” said Chevron spokesman Mickey Driver.
About 56 percent of the Gulf’s oil production was already out of operation today because of Katrina’s damage, the federal Minerals Management Service said.
At 2 p.m. EDT, Rita was centered about 165 miles southeast of Nassau, Bahamas, or about 380 miles east-southeast of Key West. It was moving to the west-northwest at about 14 mph, according to the hurricane center.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, Hurricane Philippe was far out at sea and posed no immediate threat to land. The hurricane season started June 1 and ends Nov. 30.
