Three million Americans evacuated before Hurricane Rita pummelled east Texas and the Louisiana coast, were urged not to hurry home today.

HURRICANE Rita's rains sent water pouring through breaches in a patched levee yesterday, cascading into one of the city's lowest-lying neighbourhoods in a repeat of New Orleans's flooding nightmare.

Hurricane Rita is expected to destroy almost 5,700 homes and affect more than five million Texans when it slams into the US coast overnight, officials said.