Hurricane Rita ploughs across the Gulf of Mexico

Hospital and nursing home patients were evacuated and as many as one million others were ordered to clear out along the Gulf Coast today as Hurricane Rita intensified into a Category 4 storm with 140mph winds that could batter Texas and bring more misery to New Orleans by the weekend.

Galveston, parts of Houston and New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders, one day after Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys as a Category 2 storm and caused minor damage.

Having seen what Hurricane Katrina did just three weeks ago, many people decided not to take any chances.

“After this killer in NewOrleans, Katrina, I just cannot fathom staying,” 59-year-old Ldyyan Jean Jocque said before sunrise as she waited for an evacuation bus outside the Galveston Community Centre. She had packed her Bible, some music and clothes into plastic bags and loaded her dog into a pet carrier.

The federal government was eager to show it, too, had learned its lesson after being criticised for its sluggish response to Katrina. It rushed hundreds of truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals to the Gulf Coast and put rescue and medical teams on standby.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff urged residents in the threatened areas to get out.

“You can’t play around with this storm,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He added: “The lesson is that when the storm hits, the best place to be is to be out of the path of the storm.”

At 4pm Irish time, Rita was centred about 260 miles west of Key West, Florida, and 775 miles south-east of Corpus Christi, Texas, moving west at nearly 13 mph. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore Saturday somewhere along the central Texas Gulf Coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi. But even a slight turn and a glancing blow could prove devastating to New Orleans.

Meteorologist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said Rita could strengthen to a Category 5 with wind over 155mph as it moves over the warm waters of the Gulf, or it could ease to a Category 3, with wind of less than 130mph.

Galveston County, population 267,000, was ordered evacuated, along with low-lying, flood-prone areas of Houston, which at its lowest point is 6 feet above sea level.

As many as one million people in the Houston-Galveston area were under orders to get out by dawn tomorrow, said Frank Michel, spokesman for Houston Mayor Bill White. Houston, Texas’ biggest city, is about 50 miles north-west of Galveston.

Other areas told to evacuate included Cameron Parish, in Louisiana’s south-western corner, with 9,700 residents.

Galveston, situated on a coastal island 8 feet above sea level, was the site of one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history: an unnamed hurricane in 1900 that killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

“Let’s hope that the hurricane does not hit at a Category 4 strength and let’s hope the lessons we’ve learned – the painful, tragic lessons that have been learned in the last few weeks – will best prepare us for what could happen with Rita,” Louisiana Sen Mary Landrieu said in New York.

The death toll from Katrina along the Gulf Coast climbed past 1,000 today to 1,036. The body count in Lousiana alone was put at 799 by the state Health Department.

Along the Texas Gulf Coast, authorities rushed to get the old and infirm out of harm’s way, three weeks after scores of sick and elderly nursing home patients in the New Orleans area drowned in

Katrina’s floodwaters or died in the stifling heat while waiting to be rescued.

In Galveston, the Edgewater Retirement Community, a six-story building situated near the city’s seawall, began evacuating its more than 200 nursing home patients and independent retirees by chartered bus and ambulance.

“They either go with a family member or they go with us, but this building is not safe sitting on the seawall with a major hurricane coming,” said David Hastings, executive director. “I have had several say, ‘I don’t want to go,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going.”’

Nearby at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, the hospital discharged 200 patients healthy enough to go home and evacuated others by helicopter, ambulance and buses.

“There are going to be some people who are too sick to evacuate and we are going to keep them here,” said spokeswoman Jennifer Reynolds-Sanchez.

About 80 buses were set to leave Galveston beginning at midmorning, bound for shelters 100 miles north in Huntsville. Dozens of people lined up, carrying pillows, bags and coolers, to board one of several yellow school buses leaving the city of 58,000.

“The real lesson (from Katrina) that I think the citizens learned is that the people in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi did not leave in time,” said Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas. “We’ve always asked people to leave earlier, but because of Katrina, they are now listening to us and they’re leaving as we say.”

Crude oil prices rose again on concern that Rita would smash into key oil facilities in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs, less than a month after Katrina damaged some installations. Texas, the heart of US crude production, accounts for 25% of the nation’s total oil output.