Beaumont, Texas – Hurricane Rita pounded into the Gulf Coast before dawn Saturday, causing far less damage than officials had feared but raising new concerns that its torrential rain and storm surges would cause widespread flooding across much of the region.
Federal officials said Saturday that there were no reported deaths directly connected to the storm, The Associated Press reported. On Friday, 24 residents of a living center for the elderly died when the bus in which they were being evacuated burst into flames.
Officials said the storm was less deadly than Hurricane Katrina partly because of the evacuation of millions of Gulf Coast residents, mindful of the flooding, death and destruction caused by Katrina nearly a month ago, who heeded warnings.
Houston, where 2.5 million residents choked roads for hours as they fled the approach of the storm, appears to have been spared major damage. But Mayor Bill White and Gov. Rick Perry pleaded with residents not to return home, saying it was still unsafe to do so because of rain and high winds.
Officials also are worried that a rush home would result in another nightmarish traffic jam like the one that occurred during the flight from Houston ahead of Rita’s landfall.
The storm made landfall about 1:40 a.m. MDT as a Category 3 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph, with its eye passing just east of Sabine Pass, Texas, about 32 miles southeast of Beaumont and near the Texas-Louisiana border.
After hitting land, the storm weakened to a Category 2 and later was downgraded to a tropical storm, which has sustained winds of less than 75 mph.
James Gunter, fire chief in Jasper, Texas, a small town about 70 miles north of the coast, said in a interview with KHOU-TV early in the morning: “We’ve had fires in the county that we have not been able to respond to – won’t be able to respond to, period. The entire county is without power.” Gunter added, “We can go out on the south side of our building and we can look to the south and we can see nothing less than utter devastation.”
Forecasters also warned that the greatest damage could come from an unrelenting rainfall – up to 25 inches – that could hang over the region for days and from flood tides up to 15 feet higher than normal that could inundate stretches of the Gulf Coast across Texas and Louisiana.
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Images from Hurricane Rita
Friday’s afternoon rush hour. a Red Cross shelter set up at Houston’s First Baptist Church. Saturday. where she waited in line to get food before Rita hit the area.
beach. He rode out the storm in the house. Hurricane Rita begins to make itself known. He carries the flag every day to show support for the troops.
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Rainfall will continue to affect mainly the eastern half of southeast Texas, with the heaviest rains pounding Liberty and Chambers counties, where forecasters said flooding of low- lying areas was expected.
Early Saturday morning, water levels were receding in the upper and middle portions of Galveston Bay as strong winds were pushing the water southward, causing it to pile up across bayside locations of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula.
Forecasters said the flooding farther west along Galveston Island was expected to subside by midday.
The worst damage from Hurricane Rita appeared to be in southwestern Louisiana and East Texas. But the storm also sparked fires in Galveston and Houston.
Nearly a million utility customers, including 575,000 in Houston and 250,000 along the coast, lost power.
Parts of Beaumont were flooded, and there were indications that water had been swept around Port Arthur’s horseshoe- shaped sea wall. One resident of Orange, a town just to the northeast, called the courthouse to say she was climbing into her attic to escape rising water.
In coastal counties and parishes, crews of workers rose in the dark and prepared to go out at first light to assess the damage, while inland Texas counties like Jasper were still under siege by the storm.
Initial estimates by insurance experts put the damage from Hurricane Rita at $5 billion or less, far below the estimated $35 billion in damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina nearly a month ago and the $30 billion that had been feared had Galveston and Houston taken a direct hit.
“The areas of Texas and Louisiana where this came ashore was far less developed than the coastal areas of Louisiana and Mississippi where Katrina struck,” said Robert Hartwig, the chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. Hurricane Rita also struck with less force.
On Saturday, Army helicopter crews from the 1st Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Texas, began flying Federal Emergency Management Agency teams whose job it is to gauge damage from the hurricane.
Also Saturday, 400 to 500 members of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had been assisting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, began moving from the New Orleans region toward southwest Louisiana to be prepared for search and rescue and relief operations for Hurricane Rita.