BEAUMONT, Texas – Rescuers used skiffs to take flooded-out residents to safety Monday as Hurricane Rita’s waters began to recede along the Texas-Louisiana coast. The death toll climbed to seven when the bodies of five people were discovered in a Beaumont apartment.
The five – a man, a woman and three children – apparently were overcome by carbon monoxide from a generator they were using after the hurricane knocked out the electricity over the weekend, authorities said. The children’s aunt discovered the bodies after going to check on the group.
Rita roared ashore Saturday morning, slamming the refinery towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, as well as Lake Charles, La., after an epic evacuation that emptied out a large swath of coastline and saved countless lives. Some 3 million people fled from Rita’s path after seeing what Katrina did to New Orleans a month ago.
As of Sunday night, only two deaths had been blamed directly on Rita.
“As bad as it could have been, we came out of this in pretty good shape,” said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who called the absence of widespread fatalities “miraculous.”
Hard-hit towns along the Texas-Louisiana coast began to pick up the pieces Monday: Rescuers pushed their way into once-inaccessible neighborhoods as the floodwaters dropped. Crews worked to clear roads of fallen trees and other debris so that utility workers could restore power to hundreds of thousands of people. And authorities struggled to reach 5,000 stranded cattle in a Louisiana parish.
Authorities began tallying up the damage to sugar cane fields, shrimp boats and refineries.
The more than 110,000 people living in Beaumont were urged not to return home, though, since water, electricity and sewer services will not be restored for weeks. Police blocked exits off interstate highways leading to the city.
In Lake Charles, National Guardsmen patrolled the town and handed out bottled water, ice and food to hundreds of people left without power. Scores of cars wrapped around the parking lot of the city civic center.
Dorothy Anderson said she did not have time to get groceries before the storm because she was at a funeral out of town. “We got back and everything was closed,” she said.
Mike Deroche, director of the Terrebonne Parish, La., Office of Emergency Preparedness, said that the floodwaters were going down in most areas and that the parish had nearly 9,900 homes that were severely damaged.
“We’re just starting to get back into some areas that we haven’t been able to get to,” Deroche said.
In Chauvin, a steady stream of people were brought by small boats from the flooded sections of Terrebonne Parish. Some cried as they hauled plastic bags filled with their possessions out of the skiffs that carried them to dry land.
Others cursed.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” said Danny Hunter, 56. “I called FEMA this morning, and they said they couldn’t help us because this hasn’t been declared a disaster area.”
“Texas is a disaster area!” Jenny Reading shouted. “I guess the president made sure of that, and everyone just forgot about us.”
Robert LeBlanc, director of the Vermilion Parish, La., Office of Emergency Preparedness, said just about everyone who needed to be rescued had been taken care of, and the focus instead turned to clearing the roads to Pecan Island and rescuing roughly 5,000 cattle there.
“These people’s livelihood depends on this,” he said.
LeBlanc said the parish has about 500 livestock farmers. He said that the storm also wiped out hunting camps that bring in tourists, and that shrimp boats in Delcambre had been thrown up onto the land.
Authorities had trouble keeping people from southern Louisiana from traveling through floodwaters in their own boats to discover whether Rita wrecked their homes and livelihoods. Hundreds went home to save what they could and begin rebuilding.
“Knowing these people, most of them are hunters, trappers, farmers, they’re not going to wait on FEMA or anyone else,” LeBlanc said. “They’re going to do what they need to do. They’re used to primitive conditions.”
People checking their hurricane-hit homes and towns found floodwaters up to the rooftops, coffins and refrigerators bobbing in the water, and stilts where their houses once stood.
“I’ve been through quite a few of them, and we’ve never had water like this,” said L.E. Nix, whose home on the edge of a bayou in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish was swamped with 3 feet of water. “I had a little piece of paradise, and now I guess it’s gone.”
Yet it was clear that the misery wrought by Rita was not as bad as what Katrina inflicted.
Randy Roach, mayor of Lake Charles, told CBS’s “The Early Show” his hard-hit seaport city of oil refineries and casinos would bounce back.
“The good news is that the water is going down, it’s kind of back in the banks of the lake and our recovery process is well under way,” he said. “The response has been tremendous. I really appreciate everything that the federal government has done to help us.”
In Houston, which was spared the brunt of Rita, officials set up a voluntary, staggered plan for an “orderly migration,” with different areas going home Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to avoid the monumental gridlock that accompanied the exodus last week.
By Sunday night, a seemingly endless stream of charter buses, cars and sport utility vehicles clogged the southbound lanes of Interstate 45 into Houston.
On Monday, more and more traffic lights in Houston were working properly. A long line of customers waited outside a downtown Starbucks as it reopened for the first time. Customers sat outdoors with their drinks despite hot, humid weather.
Authorities said at least 16 Texas oil refineries remained shut down. But overall the Gulf Coast petrochemical installations that supply a quarter of the nation’s gasoline suffered only a glancing blow, with just one major plant facing weeks of repairs.
The new round of flooding in New Orleans from levee breaks was isolated mostly to areas already destroyed and deserted. And contrary to dire forecasts, Rita and its heavy rains moved quickly north instead of parking over the South for days and wringing itself out with disastrous consequences.
Among the deaths attributed to Rita was a person killed in Mississippi when a tornado spawned by the hurricane overturned a mobile home, and an east Texas man struck by a falling tree. Two dozen evacuees were killed before the storm hit in a bus fire near Dallas.
In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin immediately resumed his plan to allow some residents to return to drier parts of the city, throwing open Algiers, a largely unscathed neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter.
The Army Corps of Engineers used rocks and sandbags to try to plug the levee that failed during Rita and swamped the already-devastated Ninth Ward. Workers believe that once the breaches are closed, the Ninth Ward can be pumped dry in a week.
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