Hurricane Rita News Summary

Hurricane Rita plowed into the Gulf Coast early Saturday, lashing Texas and Louisiana with driving rain, threatening to flood low-lying regions and knocking power out to half a million people as transformers exploded.

Rita struck just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line, bringing a 20-foot storm surge and up to 25 inches of rain according to National Hurricane Center said. Residents called police early Saturday to report roofs being ripped off and downed trees. Rescuers were forced to wait until the winds outside died down to safe levels. Officials breathed a sigh of relief that Rita spared the flood-prone cities of Houston and Galveston a direct hit.

Rita’s heaviest rains - up to 3 to 4 inches an hour - fell in Lake Charles, La. The town had 8 inches of rain more than two hours before the storm’s landfall.

The storm brought chaos even far from its path. Rain in New Orleans re-ruptured levees that were broken by Hurricane Katrina, bringing renewed flooding to that city. South of Dallas, a bus of Rita evacuees caught fire in gridlocked traffic, killing as many as 24 nursing home residents who who wanted to get out of harm’s way. City manager Steve LeBlanc suspected downed power lines as the cause.

“We had patients throwing up. It was very ugly,” said Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, who blamed delays on the Transportation Security Administration, which insisted every wheelchair-bound passenger be checked with a metal-detector.

As clouds thickened over Beaumont and Port Arthur on Friday afternoon and rain began to fall, only a handful of residents were still in these near-ghost towns. About 95,000 homes and businesses in Texas lost power, mostly along the coast.


In southwestern Louisiana, which was on the vulnerable east side of Rita and expected to get the brunt of a 20-foot storm surge, high winds knocked over old live oaks and lashed the low-lying landscape with driving winds.

In Lake Charles, home to the nation’s 12th-largest seaport and refineries run by ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Citgo and Shell, nearly all 70,000 residents had evacuated.

After sending in supplies, mobilizing the military and declaring emergencies in two states, federal authorities anxiously monitored Hurricane Rita’s approach to see where to deploy help in the storm’s aftermath. More than 1.5 million people have been evacuated, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Hopefully Hurricane Rita will pass through without any serious damage to life. After Katrina the entire outlook on hurricanes has undergone a radical change.