New Orleans – Hurricane Rita, a massive storm packing 165-mph winds and destructive force equal to the might of Hurricane Katrina, tracked through the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, prompting evacuation orders for more than 1.1 million Texans and the few remaining holdouts in storm-ravaged New Orleans.
After brushing the Florida Keys as a Category 2 storm, Rita intensified to Category 5, the highest ranking used by the National Hurricane Center. Authorities in Galveston, Texas, a coastal city of 58,000, ordered mandatory evacuations.
By midday, a 20-mile line of cars snaked up Interstate 45 out of Galveston – scene of the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history when an unnamed storm claimed between 8,000 and 10,000 lives in 1900. Thousands of cars crammed roads around Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, where authorities also ordered residents in low-lying areas to evacuate.
About 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 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,” Perry said.
In recent days, Rita has grown into a giant storm with hurricane- force winds stretching 45 miles from its center and tropical- storm-force winds extending 140 miles. Forecasters project Rita will make landfall early Saturday somewhere along the central Texas coast.
However, even a slight shift north would put New Orleans back in the bull’s-eye, prompting fears that the city’s already- fragile levee system could be breached again, flooding neighborhoods still coated in muck.
Painful memories of Katrina – with a death toll that reached 1,000 Wednesday – drove thousands of private residents and elected officials to act quickly rather than take the wait-and- see approach that greeted some coastal storms in recent years. In Texas, Perry urged those in the path of the storm to evacuate.
“Homes can be rebuilt; lives cannot,” he said from the governor’s mansion in Austin. “If you’re on the coast between Beaumont and Corpus Christi, now’s the time to leave.”
The Defense Department, 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,” said Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense. “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 1,300 others 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.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency positioned 45 truckloads of water and ice and 25 truckloads of ready-to-eat meals 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.
“The most important thing that we’re doing is work with the Department of Defense to use their assets upfront before the storm instead of waiting until after the storm lands,” said acting FEMA Director R. David Paulison.
