GALVESTON, Texas – Gaining strength with frightening speed, Hurricane Rita swirled toward the Gulf Coast a Category 5, 175-mph monster Wednesday as more than 1.3 million people in Texas and Louisiana were sent packing on orders from authorities who learned a bitter lesson from Katrina.
With Rita projected to hit Texas by early Saturday, Gov. Rick Perry urged residents along the state’s entire coast to begin evacuating. And New Orleans braced for the possibility that the storm could swamp the misery-stricken city all over again.
Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys and began drawing energy with terrifying efficiency from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the U.S. mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the U.S. mainland – most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.
Katrina struck at Category 4 strength.
Government officials eager to show they had learned their lessons from the sluggish response to Katrina sent in hundreds of buses to evacuate the poor, moved out hospital and nursing home patients, dispatched truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and put rescue and medical teams on standby. An Army general in Texas was told to be ready to assume control of a military task force in Rita’s wake.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency sent nearly 1,200 medical and rescue personnel into Texas.
“We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we got to be ready for the worst,” President Bush said in Washington.
Forecasters predicted the storm would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi.
But with its breathtaking size – tropical storm-force winds extending 350 miles across – practically the entire western end of the U.S. Gulf Coast was in peril, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the fractured levees protecting New Orleans.
In the Galveston-Houston-Corpus Christi area, about 1.3 million people were under orders to get out, in addition to 20,000 or more along with the Louisiana coast. Special attention was given to hospitals and nursing homes.
Military personnel in South Texas started moving north, too. Schools, businesses and universities were also shut down.
Galveston was a virtual ghost town by mid-afternoon Wednesday. In neighborhoods throughout the island city, the few people left were packing the last of their valuables and getting ready to head north.
But Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas warned late Wednesday that the city was nearly out of buses. She said those left on the island will have to find a way off or face riding out a storm that is “big enough to destroy part of the island, if not a great part of the county.”
City Manager Steve LeBlanc said the storm surge could reach 50 feet. Galveston is protected by a seawall that is only 17 feet tall.
NASA
Hurricane Rita swirls in the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday in a satellite image.
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