Houston residents stream inland in bumper-to-bumper traffic

Traffic came to a standstill and petrol shortages were reported today as hundreds of thousands of people in the Houston metropolitan area rushed to get out of the path of Hurricane Rita, a monster storm with 170mph winds.

More than 1.3 million residents in Texas and Louisiana were under orders to get out to avoid a deadly repeat of Katrina.

The category-five storm weakened slightly this morning, and forecasters said it could be down to a category-three – meaning winds up to 130mph – by the time it comes ashore late tomorrow or early Saturday. But it could still be a dangerous storm.

“Don’t follow the example of Katrina and wait. No one will come and get you during the storm,” said Harris County Judge Robert Eckels.

Highways leading inland out of Houston were gridlocked, with traffic bumper-to-bumper for up to 100 miles north of the city. Petrol stations were reported to be running out of fuel. Shoppers emptied grocery store shelves of tuna and other non-perishable items.

To speed the evacuation out of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Governor Rick Perry halted all southbound traffic into Houston along Interstate 45 and took the unprecedented stop of opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles.

I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston.

Police officers along the highways carried petrol to help people get out of town.

At 8am local time (1pm Irish time), Rita was centred about 490 miles south-east of Galveston and was moving at nearly 9mph. Its winds were 170mph, down slightly from 175mph earlier in the day.

Forecasters predicted it would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi, with up to 15 inches of rain in places.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 70 miles from the centre of the storm, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the fractured levees protecting New Orleans.

“Now is not a time for warnings. Now is a time for action,” Houston Mayor Bill White said.

He added: “There is no good place to put a shelter that could take a direct hit from a category-five hurricane. I don’t want anybody out there watching this and thinking that somebody is bound to open a local school for me tomorrow, not with a hurricane packing these kinds of winds.”