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Rita crashes into Gulf Coast

Posted on: Saturday, 24 September 2005, 09:48 CDT

By Erwin Seba

GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) - Hurricane Rita slammed into evacuated towns and oil-rich swamplands of the Texas-Louisiana border on Saturday, causing widespread damage and power outages and threatening heavy flooding.

The powerful storm crashed into the U.S. Gulf Coast with 120 mph (193 kph) winds and punishing rains, then weakened slightly as it moved inland.

It spared Houston, the fourth-largest U.S. city, a direct hit. But the oil city of Beaumont, Texas and many of the largest U.S. refiners were in Rita's path, and the extent of damage was not yet known.

Much of New Orleans was flooded again, less than a month after Hurricane Katrina, as water poured over levees.

Officials across the region said high winds had toppled trees, destroyed buildings and fanned numerous fires. A container ship broke loose, fallen trees trapped people in their homes by fallen trees and floodwaters again swept into devastated New Orleans.

Police chief Ricky Fox in Vinton, Louisiana, between Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Beaumont, Texas, told KLPC television there was widespread damage.

"I never seen anything like it ... Most of the larger buildings, the roofs are gone from them," Fox said.

Beaumont, where the U.S. oil age began with the discovery of the Spindletop oil well in 1901, was one of the hardest hit. In Lake Charles, the storm knocked a huge container ship loose from its moorings in Lake Charles and the vessel threatened to strike an interstate highway bridge over the lake, news reports said.

About two million people were without electricity in Texas and Louisiana.

"It's unbelievable," Lake Charles Police Chief Tommy Davis told a Louisiana television station. "There's going to be a lot of destruction out there."

Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the commander of relief operations in New Orleans, told CNN there was significant damage to the airport at Lake Charles, and ABC reported 8 to 10 feet (2.5 to 3 meters of floodwater in the city's southern section.

A fire engulfed three buildings in Galveston's historic downtown and another building collapsed in the same area as Rita raked the island city, which nevertheless escaped a direct hit.

Centerpoint Energy and another utility company, Entergy, said at least 900,000 customers were without power, meaning around 1.8 million people were in the dark and without air conditioning.

The storm's eye hit land in extreme southwestern Louisiana, a swampy, lightly populated area just east of Sabine Pass, Texas, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

When Rita was over the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the week, it was a roaring Category 5 storm with 175 mph (281 kph) winds, but those dropped to 120 mph (193 kph) at landfall. That made it a Category 3 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, and a slightly weaker storm at landfall than Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 in Louisiana and Mississippi three weeks ago.

By 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), the storm was midway between Jasper and Beaumont in Texas and its maximum sustained winds had dropped to 100 mph (160 kph), making it a Category 2 storm, the hurricane center said.

Forecasters had predicted a 15- to 20-foot (4.5- to 6-meter) storm surge would spill over local levees in the low-lying region and that rains up to 25 inches were possible.

The refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, better known as the hometown of late rock singer Janis Joplin, was expected to get severe flooding, officials said.

ON THE HEELS OF KATRINA

Rita was the second powerful hurricane to strike the Gulf Coast in less than a month, following Katrina.

Together, the two storms knocked out nearly all energy production in the offshore oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico and 30 percent of the nation's refining capacity onshore.

Houston, the center of the U.S. oil industry, got gusty winds and intermittent rains. But it did not take the direct hit that officials feared when they ordered a mass evacuation of the city that turned into a chaotic, 100-mile traffic jam.

"It's too early to say Texas dodged the bullet -- Houston did -- but we haven't seen what kind of flooding there might be," said Kathy Walt, spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Local officials urged all those who evacuated to take their time coming home to avoid creating a huge inbound traffic jam.

In Galveston's Poop Deck bar overlooking the Gulf, the mood was light as bar-goers drank and watched the roiling surf.

"Mother Nature must be a Yankee lady," said chef Samantha Gallion. "It's like she's angry at the southern coast. She's hit us all now. I'm joking in the face of disaster."

Most of the storm area was devoid of people after more than 2 million fled in the evacuation.

The traffic jams had clogged highways leading out of Houston, stranding thousands of motorists who ran out of gas as they inched along for hours.

The chaos turned fatal on Friday when a bus carrying residents of a Houston nursing home caught fire near Dallas, killing 24 people.

Even though Rita hit 200 miles to the west of New Orleans, the scarred city felt the effects when high tides from the storm spilled over the city's fractured levee system.

In scenes reminiscent of the days after Katrina struck on August 29, water from the city's industrial canal filled up streets in the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish where nearly all the homes are already ruined.

"There'll be some significant flooding. We've already got reports of six feet of water on highway underpasses," Army Corps of Engineers Col. Duane Gapiski told CNN:

(Additional reporting by Allan Dowd in Louisiana, Matt Daily in Houston and Daisuke Wakabayashi in Austin)

Source: REUTERS

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