Sabine Pass, Texas – As Texans watched Hurricane Rita – at one point a Category 5 storm – spinning in the Gulf of Mexico, they didn’t see any good alternatives. The storm was on track to slam Galveston and drench flood- prone Houston.
If it moved north, the Golden Triangle of the petroleum industry would get a direct hit.
But the storm weakened slightly and made landfall in an evacuated shrimping village surrounded by marsh and a wildlife refuge, perhaps the best place to avoid deaths and economic damage.
“Even though the people right here in Beaumont and Port Arthur and this part of Orange County really got whacked, the rest of the state missed a bullet,” Gov. Rick Perry said.
The storm weakened before hitting land, and it changed course. On Wednesday and early Thursday, Rita appeared headed straight for Galveston and the heavily populated corridor between there and Houston.
Visions of a repeat of Katrina spurred a mass evacuation, which ended up causing more deaths than the storm itself – 23 people died when a bus carrying nursing-home evacuees burst into flames in standstill traffic Friday.
As of Sunday, two deaths were blamed directly on the storm, those of a Mississippi woman who was killed by a tornado that spun off the remains of the hurricane and a Texas man who suffered a broken neck and head injuries after a tree fell on him.
Rita’s eye came ashore over Sabine Pass early Saturday, doing the kind of wholesale damage to the town that was seen up and down the Mississippi coast during Hurricane Katrina.
The most intense side of the storm passed over lightly populated areas of southwestern Louisiana before causing significant damage in Cameron, Lake Charles and Abbeville.
In Port Arthur, 10 miles north of Sabine Pass and the first significant city the storm hit as it came ashore, water never topped the 17-foot seawall that shields the city from Sabine Lake.
“From my point of view, we’re lucky,” Port Arthur police officer Mike Hebert said Sunday.
Farther north in Beaumont, though, Jefferson County officials said it will be days, if not weeks, before power, water and sewer service can be restored.
