Hurricane Rita brings early death and destruction

Hurricane Rita steamed toward refinery towns along the Texas-Louisiana coast with 120mph winds early today, creating havoc even before it arrived.

Levee breaks caused new flooding in New Orleans, and as many as 24 people were killed when a bus carrying nursing-home evacuees caught fire in a traffic jam.

Rita weakened into a Category 3 hurricane after raging as a Category 5, 175mph monster earlier in the week.

But it is still a highly dangerous storm.

The hurricane is expected to come ashore early today US time on a course that could spare Houston and Galveston but slam the oil refining towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, with a 20ft storm surge, towering waves and up to 25in of rain.

“That’s where people are going to die,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre. “All these areas are just going to get absolutely clobbered by the storm surge.”

Late last night, south western Louisiana was soaked by driving rain and coastal flooding. Sugarcane fields, ranches and marshlands were already under water in coastal Cameron Parish.

The sparsely populated region was almost completely evacuated, but authorities rushed to the aid of a man who had decided to ride out the storm in a house near the Gulf of Mexico after one of his friends called for help.

They were turned back by flooded roads.

“He’s going to take the full brunt of this hurricane coming in,” sheriff’s Captain James Hines said.

Empty coastal highways and small towns were blasted with wind-swept rain. A metal hurricane evacuation route sign along one road wagged violently in the wind, and clumps of cattle huddled in fields.

Steve Rinard, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Lake Charles, said he could not keep count of the tornado warnings across southern Louisiana. “They were just popping up like firecracers,” he said.

Rita threatened dozens of shuttered refineries and chemical plants along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast that represent a quarter of the nation’s oil refining capacity. Environmentalists warned of the risk of a toxic spill, and business analysts said Rita could cause already-high petrol prices to rise to as much as $4 (€3.30) a gallon.

In the storm’s cross-hairs were the marshy towns along the Louisiana line: Port Arthur, a city of about 58,000 where the main industries include oil, shrimping and crawfishing; and Beaumont, a port city of about 114,000 that was the birthplace of the modern oil industry. It was in Beaumont that the Spindletop well erupted in a 100ft gusher in 1901 and gave rise to such giants as Gulf, Humble and Texaco.

President George Bush, mindful of criticism that the federal government was slow to respond to Katrina, had planned to visit his home state to review the Rita response but cancelled at the last minute to avoid slowing down the preparations. He planned to watch over the storm from the US Northern Command in Colorado Springs.

At least 2.8 million people fled a 500-mile stretch of the Louisiana-Texas coastline in an evacuation that caused monumental traffic jams in which hundreds of cars broke down or ran out of petrol. By midday yesterday, the bumper-to-bumper traffic had cleared from the outskirts of Houston toward Austin and Dallas.

In a traffic jam on Interstate 45 near Wilmer, south east of Dallas, a bus evacuating nursing home residents from Houston caught fire, killing as many as 24 people. Early indications were that mechanical problems caused the fire, and then passengers’ oxygen tanks started exploding in rapid succession.

At 11pm EDT Friday (3am Irish time), Rita was centred about 55 miles south east of Sabine Pass along the coast at the Texas-Louisiana border, moving northwest at near 13mph, and forecasters said it could weaken further become coming ashore.

In Lake Charles, home to the US’s 12th-largest seaport and refineries run by ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Citgo and Shell, nearly all the 70,000 residents had evacuated. Several riverboat casinos that mostly serve tourists from Texas also closed ahead of the storm.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said more than 90% of residents in south western parishes, about 150,000 people, had been evacuated. For those who had not, she issued a warning: “You need to find a safe place to be. It is not safe to find yourself stranded on the highway. Get to the highest ground or the highest building in your area.”