WASHINGTON, 23 September 2005 — A million people fled their homes as Hurricane Rita, with winds of 264 km per hour, continued barreling toward Texas after delivering rain and high winds on the Florida Keys.
The latest projected path of a potentially catastrophic Category 4 Hurricane Rita shifted east yesterday, pushing the storm on a track toward the Houston or Galveston areas.
Rita is currently the third strongest hurricane ever in the Atlantic and could be the strongest hurricane on record to ever hit Texas. The hurricane is expected to slam into a region of the Texas coast that is home to a heavy concentration of petroleum refineries, while five percent of US refining capacity remains shut down in Louisiana and Mississippi due to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico was down 73 percent since Wednesday from a normal 1.5 million barrels per day as a result of damage from Hurricane Katrina and in preparation for Hurricane Rita.
If the storm follows its current path, Rita could hit the coast of Texas late today or early tomorrow, where Texas refineries process about 4.6 million barrels of oil a day, or about a third of the nation’s oil. Hundreds of workers have been evacuated from offshore oilrigs and platforms — those that escaped unscathed from Katrina.
The biggest worry is the potential of Katrina-like damage to the huge refineries clustered near Houston, Port Arthur, Galveston and Corpus Christi, which together produce a quarter of the gasoline consumed by US motorists.
Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, people are preparing for the worst. Authorities in Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi, and a mostly emptied-out New Orleans were all under mandatory evacuation orders. As many as one million people from Galveston and other Texas Gulf coast communities joined in the evacuation.
“Don’t follow the example of Katrina and wait. No one will come and get you during the storm,” Harris County Judge Robert Eckels said in Houston.
Highways leading inland out of Houston were gridlocked, with traffic bumper-to-bumper for up to 160 km north of the city. Gas stations were reported to be running out of gas. Shoppers emptied grocery store shelves of tuna and other nonperishable items.
To speed the evacuation out of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Gov. Rick Perry halted all southbound traffic into Houston along Interstate 45 and took the unprecedented step of opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 200 km. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston.
Having learned from the sluggish rescue operations during Katrina, emergency centers went on high alert as hundreds of buses were sent in to evacuate the poor on the Texas coastlines, many of whom do not own cars. Special attention was also given to coastline hospitals and nursing homes, after dozens of sick and elderly patients in the New Orleans area drowned in Katrina’s floodwaters or died in the stifling heat while waiting to be rescued.
The White House had simple instructions for Americans in areas expected to be hit by the hurricane: “Get out.” “Hurricane Rita is an extremely dangerous storm,” said spokesman Scott McClellan. “The best thing that people can do who are in the path of the storm is to get out, to evacuate.”
US President George W. Bush, under fire over Washington’s widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, has spoken twice in two days with Governor Rick Perry of Texas, he said.
Officials were “very much focused on Rita’s potential impact on New Orleans, the once glittering jazz capital turned flooded ghost-town in Katrina’s wake,” said McClellan.
“The concern with New Orleans right now is the rainfall and the weakened state of the levees, and the additional rainfall that could lead to flooding and pose problems in New Orleans,” said the spokesman.
McClellan said that Washington was pre-positioning federal troops to respond to Rita “to provide help with relief,” stressing that the US Coast Guard would play a key role in search and rescue operations.
“We’ve positioned a lot of federal resources in the region to assist with the evacuations that are going on and to provide commercial aircraft, buses, and other transportation needs — rail cars,” he said.
