ABBEVILLE, La. – Scouring waves lashed by Hurricane Rita’s assault on the Gulf Coast Saturday spread a new tide of watery desolation across storm-exhausted Louisiana, rolling over bayou country on the state’s southwest coast and trapping hundreds on rooftops.
Texas was spared widespread destruction, but some shoreline oil towns struggled with high water and wind damage.
At least 1,000 Louisiana residents were rescued by Coast Guard helicopter teams and volunteers in airboats. But as daylight faded, hundreds more remained on rooftops, with water levels rising.
Despite the dire situation in southwest Louisiana and across the Sabine River into east Texas, authorities appeared relieved that Houston and cities along the vulnerable coastline in both states appeared to have been spared widespread destruction.
“The damage is not as severe as we expected it to be,” said R. David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He credited the evacuation of nearly 3 million people in Texas and as many as 1 million in Louisiana with preventing an immediate wave of storm fatalities.
Authorities said a tornado killed one person in the Mississippi Delta as Rita whirled north. No other fatalities in the storm’s direct path were reported.
It was an outcome far different from the devastation last month in Mississippi and the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina, which claimed at least 1,000 lives.
New Orleans’ low-lying wards suffered more flooding Saturday after rain breached a canal levee. Officials predicted a quick recovery. But there was achingly familiar havoc in the southern New Orleans suburb of Lafitte, where rescuers in boats aided more than 500 people stranded on roofs and second-floor landings by floodwaters rising from the Barataria Bay Waterway.
As daylight dimmed over southwest Louisiana, Coast Guard helicopters and search teams navigating in airboats rushed to respond to dozens of 911 calls. Searchers converged on sodden towns where scores of residents were isolated in their homes by 15-foot storm surges.
“Southwest Louisiana has certainly been assaulted by Hurricane Rita, and southeast Louisiana is taking on water,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said. “Hurricane Rita has compounded Louisiana’s pain.”
The hurricane’s fraying core roared ashore in the pre-dawn darkness. The storm thundered over the Sabine River along the border between Louisiana and Texas, making landfall as a Category 3 storm, centered by a 20-mile-wide eye.
The storm weakened to a tropical storm as it moved north toward Arkansas, shedding funnel clouds and loosing torrents of rain expected to total as much as two feet over the next several days. More than 1 million people were left without electricity.
Floodwaters swiftly rose 9 feet in the southern Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 25 miles inside Lafayette Parish. Several miles to the west, sheriff’s deputies in Cameron Parish watched in awe as appliances and crumbled sections of houses floated off in the strong currents of the Intracoastal Waterway.
More than a third of Cameron Parish was under water on Saturday, its bayous displaced by a vast plain of seawater from Vermilion Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the parish’s 10,000 residents had fled. Entire towns were gone, among them Intracoastal City, Esther, Henry, Erath, Forked Island, Pecan Island, Delcom and Mouton Cove.
Officials said more than 10 feet of water could sweep over some southwest Louisiana towns by this morning, but they expected the surge to begin to retreat later in the day.
Beaumont, a vacated city of 114,000, took on 3 feet of seawater. In nearby Port Arthur, floodwaters were even deeper, streaming over highways and intersections.
“In a lot of residential areas, roads are impassable,” Beaumont Police Chief David Travis said. “There are just so many thousands of trees down. It’s hard to even describe, it’s so immense.”
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