Thousands told to flee hurricane

Nearly a half-million people in the US were today urged to flee their homes as a a fearsome hurricane barrelled toward the Gulf Coast with 140 mph winds.

“We have a real disaster in the making,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida. “This is going to be the worst hurricane to hit the Louisiana coast since reconnaissance data has been available” since the mid-1940s.

Resort towns in Louisiana and Texas boarded up, along with all 12 of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast casinos, Nasa’s Mission Control in Houston, the nation’s biggest oil import terminal, and the Tabasco bottling plant near the Louisiana coast.

Lili was expected to come ashore in Louisiana this morning as a major, destructive hurricane, Category 4 on the five-point scale. Forecasters warned that some areas could be inundated with six to 10 inches of rain and a life-threatening storm surge of up to 20ft.

About 143,000 people were urged to leave the Louisiana coast, while in Texas officials advised the 330,000 residents in two counties surrounding Beaumont and Port Arthur to head inland because of the threat of a 9ft storm surge.

Hurricane-force winds – which extended outward 45 miles from the centre of Lili – were expected to reach up to 150 miles inland. At 11pm local time (4am UK time), Lili was 195 miles south of New Orleans.

In Texas, thousands fled inland by truckload and busload, searching for shelter.

Texas Governor Rick Perry signed a disaster declaration and corrections officials moved more than 3,000 inmates to inland lockups.

The storm forced the shutdown of Mission Control in Houston, delaying for nearly a week yesterday’s shuttle launch 900 miles away at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first time in 41 years of manned spaceflight that bad weather in Houston delayed a Florida launch.

At Louisiana’s Avery Island, home of Tabasco hot pepper sauce, the McIlhenny Company shut down its lone bottling plant.

“We’ll be closed as long as it takes to get our power back and let our people clean out their homes,” said executive vice president Tony Simmons. But he said hot sauce lovers need not worry: “We’re not anticipating anyone running out of Tabasco.”

Officials in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, ordered an evacuation yesterday, but some residents complained they had no transportation to leave.

“It’s hard to open a shelter when you’re going to have 10ft of water in it,” parish emergency director Jim Anderson said. He said the parish might open what he called “last resort” shelters today for those unable to leave.

Grand Isle, the storm-vulnerable island south of New Orleans, ordered its 1,500 residents to get out even as workers completed repairs on a 2,500 section of levee washed out last week by Tropical Storm Isidore.

Nearby, Port Fourchon was also shutting down and evacuating. An estimated 16% of the nation’s crude oil and 17% of its natural gas come from rigs and platforms that require access to the port.

LOOP, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port around 20 miles off the coast, also closed. It is the biggest US crude oil import terminal, handling around one million barrels of crude a day, or 11% of US imports.

A hurricane warning stretched from just east of High Island, Texas, to the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.

Earlier, Lili barrelled through the Caribbean, killing seven people and driving tens of thousands of Cubans from their homes.