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Rita brings 1st deaths
24/09/2005 07:47 - (SA)
Texas - Hurricane Rita steamed toward refinery towns along the Texas-Louisiana coast with 193km/h winds, 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 during on Friday into a Category 3 hurricane after raging as a Category 5, 282km/h monster earlier in the week. But it was still a highly dangerous storm.
The hurricane was expected to come ashore early on Saturday.
"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."
'Not my first rodeo'
Police rescued four people huddled under an overhang outside the locked downtown civic centre in Lake Charles.
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 gasoline prices to rise to as much as $4 (3.30) a gallon.
Mike Hargrave, 42, was ordered to evacuate from his home in Sulphur, just west of Lake Charles. He arrived late on Thursday at a church shelter in Lafayette, 130km east, carrying only a bag of clothes.
"The police told me we will escort you out or you will be going to jail," he said.
Kandy Huffman had no way to leave, and she pushed her broken-down car down the street to her home with plans to ride out the storm in an otherwise-deserted Port Arthur, where the streetlights were turned off and stores were boarded up.
"This isn't my first rodeo. All you can do is pray for best," she said as a driving rain started to fall. "We're surrounded by the people we love. Even if we have to all cuddle up, we know where everybody is."
In New Orleans, which had just drained nearly all the putrid floodwaters from Katrina, Rita's wind and rain sent water gushing through a patched levee along the Industrial Canal and into the already-devastated Ninth Ward and parts of neighbouring St Bernard Parish. The water rose to waist level.
"Our worst fears came true," said Major Barry Guidry, a National Guardsman on duty at the broken levee in the Ninth Ward.
Refugees from the misery-stricken neighbourhood learned of the crisis with despair.
"It's like looking at a murder," Quentrell Jefferson said as he watched the news at a church in Lafayette, 200km west of New Orleans. "The first time is bad. After that, you numb up."
At least 2.8 million people fled a 800km stretch of the Louisiana-Texas coastline in a seemingly all-at-once evacuation that caused monumental traffic jams in which hundreds of cars broke down or ran out of gas.
In a traffic jam on Interstate 45 near Wilmer, southeast 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.
- AP
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