Hurricane Rita comes ashore

Hurricane Rita ploughed into the Gulf Coast early today, lashing Texas and Louisiana with driving rain, igniting the pre-dawn sky with exploding transformers and threatening to flood the low-lying region.

Rita made landfall at 8.38am Irish time as a Category 3 storm just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana border, bringing with it a 20ft storm surge and up to 25 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Centre said.

Its 12 mph speed spread worries it would dump nearly 2ft of rain on flood-prone parts of Texas and Louisiana, spurring tornadoes as it churned north-northwest with winds topping 120 mph.

Texas officials breathed a sigh of relief that Rita spared two flood-prone cities a direct hit. “It looks like the Houston and Galveston area has really lucked out,” said Max Mayfield, director of the centre.

Asked how Rita compared with the devastating hit of Hurricane Katrina, Mayfield said: “It’s not as powerful, not as large and it did not hit as populated an area.”

Officials estimated at least 90% of surrounding Jefferson County residents had heeded warnings that a storm surge could submerge swathes of the low-lying county – including the sea wall-and-levee-protected city of Port Arthur, near Sabine Pass.

The storm brought chaos even far from its path. Rain in New Orleans re-ruptured levees that were broken by Hurricane Katrina, bringing renewed flooding to that city. South of Dallas, a bus of Rita evacuees from Houston caught fire in gridlocked traffic, killing as many as 24 nursing home residents who thought they were getting out of harm’s way.

Windows blew out in the lobby of a hotel in Beaumont, near where the storm made landfall, and shards of glass and pieces of trees were strewn throughout the flooding lobby, KHOU-TV reported.

Rescuers were forced to wait until the winds outside died down to safe levels before starting searches and sending out military meals, water and fuel.

“We’re been getting a few calls from people who say, ’Hey, can you get me out or check on me afterwards?’ and the answer is we’ll check on you afterwards,” said Robin Martin, who runs the emergency dispatch centre in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

As the storm raged, the torches of oil refineries could still be seen burning in the distance from central Beaumont. Officials worried about the storm’s threat to those facilities and chemical plants strung along the Texas and Louisiana coast.

The facilities represent a quarter of the nation’s oil refining capacity and business analysts said damage from Rita could send gas prices rising.

Environmentalists warned of the risk of a toxic spill.

President George Bush, mindful of criticism the federal government was slow to respond to Katrina, planned to visit his home state today.

He will go to the state’s emergency operations centre in Austin and then to San Antonio.