BEAUMONT, Texas – With Hurricane Rita bearing down on the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, authorities ordered more than 2 million people to flee inland, setting off marathon traffic jams that paralyzed major highways for hours, strained fuel supplies and spread panic in both states.
After surging to a Category 5 hurricane with 175 mph winds, Rita had eased to a Category 4 storm by nightfall Thursday, still brimming with 140-mph winds that extended out at least 80 miles and a massive cloud cover that loomed over half the Gulf of Mexico.
One day from Rita’s expected landfall, the storm taxed the preparations of a region still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, and confronted fleeing evacuees with a cascade of personal crises.
Hundreds of thousands of Texans heading away from the Gulf in cars and vans overloaded with possessions endured hours of gridlock in wilting 90-degree heat. Some spent the entire day in their cars inching through traffic. Some diverted to gas stations only to find pumps drained of fuel. Long convoys of yellow schoolbuses, lined as if on field trips, ferried thousands of poor residents who suffered long hours without air conditioning.
Long lines and chaos snarled evacuees when they tried to catch flights at both of Houston’s airports. After nearly 100 federal security screeners failed to report to work Thursday, scores of passengers missed flights and waited for hours at sparsely monitored X-ray machines and luggage conveyors. Transportation Security Administration officials were at a loss for an explanation and scrambled to send in a team of replacements from Cleveland.
Forecasters said publicly that the hurricane would come ashore somewhere between Galveston and the Louisiana border, but emergency officials were told that the likely landfall point was near the Texas towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur.
The National Weather Service warned of massive 15- to 20-foot storm surges and the prospect of flooding miles inland. “We’ve brought the winds down a little bit here, but it’s going over a warm eddy in the Gulf of Mexico tonight,” warned Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. “We actually think it has a chance to strengthen again tonight and in the early morning hours.”
Even 400 miles out in the Gulf, the hurricane spun advance tendrils of rain over flood-weary New Orleans and swelled tides along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast by 2 feet.
At the National Hurricane Center in Miami, meteorologist Chris Landsea said Rita could shower the city with 3 to 5 inches of rain. The Army Corps of Engineers said the city’s battered levee system could handle about 6 inches of rain.
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