Port Arthur, Texas – Hurricane Rita assaulted a vast swath of the Gulf Coast late Friday, its torrential rain, towering storm surge and destructive winds again inundating parts of New Orleans and threatening to swamp key oil refineries.
Rita’s first victims – 24 elderly or infirm evacuees – died not from water, not from wind, but from fire. Flames killed them in what they thought was the safety of a bus carrying them away from a Houston suburb – and from danger.
Other people hundreds of miles from the coast – including many evacuees seeking refuge – also confronted grave risk: Rita was predicted to linger for days over northeast Texas, western Louisiana and Arkansas, pouring up to 25 inches of rain and generating perilous inland floods.
Another natural disaster was in the making – the second in fewer than four weeks.
“If you see this Social Security number on a body, it’s mine,” said Norma Kirk, 64, a resident of Port Arthur, directly in the storm’s predicted path.
She wrote the number on her arm before police showed up just ahead of the storm to take her to safety.
Officials said Rita could destroy 6,000 homes, affect 1.8 million households and inflict more than $8 billion in damage – in Texas alone.
“Keep this state in your prayers,” Gov. Rick Perry said.
About 450 miles away, water spilled over at least one levee and floods returned to parts of devastated New Orleans. Many neighborhoods severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29 also caught a wet slap from Rita, though few people had returned.
Water 8 feet deep covered streets and seeped into houses in the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, the Arabi and Chalmette neighborhoods and elsewhere.
Portions of Gulfport and other Mississippi towns also endured new floods, and forecasters warned points as far as Alabama to expect the same.
Still, Rita aimed its worst at the Texas-Louisiana border, east of Galveston and Houston and west of New Orleans.
The state line isn’t densely populated, though many small cities at or near the coast – Port Arthur and Beaumont in Texas and Lake Charles, Cameron and Abbeville in Louisiana – sat shuttered, as those who defied evacuation orders shuddered.
“Unfortunately, they’re on their own,” said Port Arthur police officer Rocky Bridges.
In addition, four large oil refineries stand in that area, and 12 others are nearby.
Hundreds of oil rigs stood between Rita and the coast. More shortages of gasoline and natural-gas supplies seemed certain, as did more price increases.
The storm was immense. Rita’s spiral bands of wind and rain pounded the coast throughout the day and night, heralding the predawn Saturday arrival of the eye wall and sustained winds that could reach 115 mph.
Rita’s hurricane winds stretched 85 miles in most directions and could retain their power 100 miles inland; its tropical- storm-force winds extended 205 miles from the center; its rain field reached even farther.
Though its top winds weakened a bit during the day Friday, this hurricane could bring a storm surge that could inundate low-lying portions of the coast with 15 feet of seawater.
“This is the tsunami effect,” said Jack Colley, Texas’ emergency-operations coordinator.
Nearly everyone who left the coast seemed to have made it inland, but many remained stranded and scattered across Texas, searching for gasoline, food and, in some cases, medical attention.
At one point, huge military cargo airplanes flew 1,300 people out of the Beaumont-Port Arthur area, many from local hospitals, nursing homes and private residences. Many of those evacuees were critically ill, attached to respirators and intravenous tubes.
But, as always, some people in vulnerable areas insisted on staying. About 500 holdouts remained in Port Arthur, a bayside shipping and oil-refinery city of 57,000. Others were found in Beaumont, also an oil-refining center.
“I know it sounds stupid, but I’m just going to stay here and ride it out, do the best I can,” said Earl M. Ricardo, 58, a lifelong Beaumont resident who was riding his bicycle along Fourth Street, where empty plastic bottles blew down the pavement.
Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center near Miami, said the greatest initial danger came from storm surge.
Some islands, including Galveston, could get hit by floods coming and going – from the Gulf of Mexico as the center approaches and from bays as the storm leaves and water drains back out to sea.
But Mayfield emphasized that people well inland also had to maintain utmost vigilance.
The Beaumont-Port Arthur area that seemed most directly targeted by the storm is home to many refineries and related facilities.
“There are petrochemical facilities in those locations that are sure to be impacted,” Mayfield said. “The strong winds will also test the building codes in the path of Rita.”
Well before making landfall, Rita had disrupted delivery of gasoline to much of the nation.
Explorer Pipeline of Tulsa, Okla., whose pipelines provide 10 percent of the Midwest’s gasoline, said its customers would get no gas for at least several days. Longhorn Pipeline, which flows into New Mexico and Arizona, also remained closed.
Colonial Pipeline of Alpharetta, Ga., said it was forced into periodic shutdowns Friday because it was receiving reduced supplies from refiners. Colonial’s network flows through the Southeast and mid-Atlantic. It expects to draw gasoline from other refiners over the next few days.
The website Rigzone.com, which tracks the offshore oil industry, warned that more than 1,200 offshore oil and natural- gas rigs faced hurricane-force winds.
So do many refineries; 19 of 26 Texas refineries were closed Friday. Should they stay closed more than two weeks, gasoline prices nationwide could surge to more than $4 a gallon, analysts warned.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
