Rita heads for Texas as Category 5 hurricane

By Mark Babineck

GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) – Hurricane Rita strengthened on
Wednesday into a powerful, intensely dangerous Category 5 storm
as it headed toward the Texas coast and prompted evacuation
orders for more than a million people.

The storm had grown into the third most intense Atlantic
hurricane on record as measured by internal pressure, the U.S.
National Hurricane Center said.

The hurricane center said Rita was “a potentially
catastrophic” Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds
rising to 175 mph (281 kph) over the warm waters of the Gulf of
Mexico. That matched the peak strength over water of last
month’s devastating Hurricane Katrina, which hit land as a
Category 4 storm with 145-mph (233-kph) winds.

A hurricane watch was issued for the U.S. Gulf Coast from
Fort Mansfield Texas, to Cameron, Louisiana. Rita was expected
to come ashore late on Friday or early on Saturday as a “major
hurricane … at (Category 3) or higher,” hurricane center
forecaster Robbie Berg said.

President George W. Bush declared emergencies for Texas and
Louisiana.

“Federal, state and local governments are coordinating
their efforts to get ready,” said Bush, who was heavily
criticized for an ill-prepared federal response to Hurricane
Katrina last month that killed more than 1,000 people.

“We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a
devastating storm, but we’ve got to be ready for the worst,”
Bush said.

Rita lashed the Florida Keys on Tuesday but did little
damage to the vulnerable Florida islands.

Rita’s path included the Texas coast southwest of
Galveston, where in 1900 at least 8,000 people died in the
deadliest recorded U.S. hurricane.

Just last month, Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and killed at least 1,037
people.

Financial markets reacted immediately to news the storm had
gained strength, with the prospect of more destruction and
oil-supply interruptions affecting everything from stocks and
the dollar to oil prices.

MASSIVE EVACUATION ORDERED

Galveston, a city of about 58,000 people located on a
barrier island, began evacuating residents on Tuesday. More
than 50 miles inland, Houston Mayor Bill White ordered an
evacuation of residents in areas prone to storm surges or major
floods.

Officials said as many as 1.2 million people were expected
to start leaving Houston, America’s fourth most populous city
with about 2 million residents and an international center for
the oil industry. The city was the most popular destination for
evacuees from Katrina, which displaced about 1 million people,
including nearly all of New Orleans’s 450,000 residents.

Stores in Houston quickly ran out of emergency supplies,
plywood and food. The last major hurricane to hit Houston was
Alicia in 1983, a Category 3 storm that killed 22 people.
Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 caused extensive flooding in the
city and killed more than 40 people across the United States.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged Texans along a 300-mile (483
km) stretch comprising most of the state’s coastline, to leave.
He said nursing home residents already were being evacuated.

The Mexican government issued a tropical storm watch for
the country’s northeast coast from Rio San Fernando northward.

“Everyone’s scared, that’s why we’re all leaving,”
Galveston Island resident Maria Stephens said, citing
television images of Katrina’s devastation. “I saw the people
at the shelters and the bodies floating in the water. I don’t
want that to be my family.”

NASA prepared to evacuate its Johnson Space Center in
Houston and turn over control of the International Space
Station to its Russian partners.

About 1,100 Katrina evacuees still in Houston’s two mass
shelters were being sent to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Some
Houston hospitals were evacuated.

New Orleans, flooded by Katrina, was taking no chances.
Mayor Ray Nagin said two busloads of people had been evacuated
already and 500 other buses were ready.

State officials said an estimated 9,700 residents of
Cameron Parish on the Louisiana-Texas border were told to
leave. They added that 2,662 people housed in shelters after
Katrina were relocated to facilities farther north in the
state, and 5,054 more were expected to be moved.

A FEMA spokesman said Rita was not expected to re-flood New
Orleans if the storm stayed on its current westward course.

GOVERNMENTS, OIL INDUSTRY RESPOND

At 11 p.m. EDT (0300 GMT), Rita’s center was about 570
miles east-southeast of Galveston and moving toward the west
near 9 mph (14 kph), the hurricane center said.

Taking lessons from problems after Katrina hit, U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said authorities
had positioned supplies and were checking on communications
systems. The government sent Coast Guard Rear Adm. Larry Hereth
to Texas to coordinate the response.

“I hope that by doing what the state officials and mayors
are doing now … getting people who are invalids out of the
way, encouraging people to leave early, that when the storm
hits, there will be property damage but hopefully there won’t
be a lot of people to rescue,” Chertoff told MSNBC.

Oil companies just starting to recover from Katrina
evacuated Gulf oil rigs as Rita moved closer. Four Texas
refineries were shut down, even as four refineries remained
shut in Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina.

Together with the 5 percent of U.S. refinery capacity shut
since Katrina, the four closed Texas refineries add up to about
11.5 percent of U.S. oil refining.

A U.S. energy official said the risk of flooding at the
Texas refineries was less than what Katrina posed in Louisiana,
because they were on higher ground.

U.S. light crude oil rose $1.15 per barrel to $67.35. The
dollar weakened and U.S. stock prices amid concerns about the
storm’s impact on energy costs and consumer spending.

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston, Adam Entous
and Caren Bohan in Washington, and Allan Dowd in Baton Rouge)