BEAUMONT, Texas – Hurricane Rita’s strongest winds came ashore along the Texas-Louisiana early today, battered the coast with stinging rain and pounding waves that threatened flooding across the low-lying region.
The eyewall – the ring of 120-mph winds surrounding Rita’s calm eye – lashed the coastal area between Sabine Pass, Texas, and Cameron, La., according to the National Hurricane Center.
The storm weakened to a Category 3 hurricane during the day. It was expected to make landfall near Port Arthur around midnight PDT Friday.
Earlier, with the eye of the storm about 300 miles from New Orleans, Rita was flinging 70 mph gusts; it swelled the flood-ravaged city’s canals by 2 feet. Water again streamed over the Industrial Canal levee and pooled waist-deep in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of Hurricane Katrina’s hardest-hit neighborhoods a month ago.
Power failed about 8 p.m. across most of coastal Jefferson County, Texas, as Rita’s outer bands struck. Within two hours, powerful headwinds raked the town and the air thickened with rain.
Authorities said several tornadoes spun off the front end of the storm, and the wind was so fierce that police and emergency agencies in the area prepared to pull their officers off the streets until this morning.
“We’re all just hunkered down now,” said Beaumont emergency management assistant coordinator R.J. Smith. “We’ve done what we can.”
The chaotic traffic jams that overwhelmed highways in Houston and across the state appeared to ease Friday. But hundreds of abandoned cars littered highways from Galveston to Houston as evacuees searched on foot for shelter.
And emergency officials made last-minute efforts to aid residents unable to evacuate the threatened coastline on their own.
C-130 cargo planes airlifted 4,000 hospital and nursing home patients out of the port cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur. Houston police patrolled the region’s highways in transit buses, picking up hundreds of evacuees who had run out of gas.
In its final, daylong passage over the Gulf of Mexico, Rita reduced sharply from a Category 5 hurricane – the top rating on the intensity scale used by meteorologists – to a Category 3. But experts warned that Rita’s shrunken state was deceptive, pointing to reports of rising tides, 50 mph gusts and violent surf as evidence that the storm remained coiled with explosive energy.
“It’s still a major hurricane,” said Chris Sisko, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.The storm was so vast, with hurricane-force winds extending 85 miles from the eye and tropical-force winds stretching 205 miles, that its approach was felt all along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast for nearly half a day before the expected landfall.
By evening, powerful sheets of rain shuddered against vacant buildings along Sabine Pass and parts of Port Arthur, and palm trees shook like pom-poms. The wind droned, a baleful, eerie hum. Boiling surf topped by 17-foot waves hammered the coast. Downtown Beaumont was expected to be submerged by this morning.
In New Orleans, 240 miles to the east, officials had hoped that a Texas landfall might spare their repaired levees and newly pumped-out city streets. After hours of rainfall, a levee was breached just after 10 a.m. by torrents running from the Industrial Canal.
“We can’t get access” to the canal, said Dan Hitchings, a spokesman for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The storm’s advance winds were snapping at 40 mph, too strong to allow helicopters to fly out heavy sandbags.
Tom Costello, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in Houston, said FEMA had 4,000 workers in place throughout Texas.
Rita developments
* Rita was expected to come ashore early today on a course that could spare Houston and Galveston but slam the oil refining towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, La., with a 20-foot storm surge, towering waves and up to 25 inches of rain.
* Steady rain in New Orleans breached two patched levees in the low-lying Ninth Ward and the Gentilly district. Water was waist deep and rising.
* The freeways in Houston had cleared out by Friday, but traffic was still bumper-to-bumper from the outskirts of the city toward Austin and Dallas.
* About 3,400 soldiers of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stood ready for post-Rita relief duty as the hurricane moved toward shore. Air Force planes evacuated thousands of people.
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