Traffic crawls as Rita rages
HOUSTON – Hurricane Rita closed in on the Texas Gulf Coast and the heart of the U.S. oil-refining industry with howling 140 mph winds Thursday, but a sharper-than-expected turn to the right set it on a course that could spare Houston and nearby Galveston a direct hit.
The storm’s march toward land sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the nation’s fourth-largest city in a frustratingly slow, bumper-to-bumper exodus.
“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” said Judie Anderson, who covered just 45 miles in 12 hours after setting out from her home in the Houston suburb of LaPorte. “They say we’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina. Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”
In all, nearly 2 million people along the Texas and Louisiana coasts were urged to get out of the way of Rita, a 400-mile-wide storm that weakened Thursday from a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4 as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico.
The storm’s course change could send it away from Houston and Galveston and instead draw the hurricane toward Port Arthur, Texas, or Lake Charles, La., at least 60 miles up the coast, by late Friday or early Saturday.
But it was still an extremely dangerous storm – and one aimed at a section of coastline with the nation’s biggest concentration of oil refineries. Environmentalists warned of the possibility of a toxic spill from the 87 chemical plants and petroleum installations that represent more than one-fourth of U.S. refining capacity.
Rita also brought rain to already battered New Orleans, raising fears that the city’s Katrina-damaged levees would fail and flood the city all over again.
At 8 p.m. PDT, Rita was centered about 350 miles southeast of Galveston and was moving at near 10 mph. Its winds were 140 mph, down from 175 mph earlier in the day.
Forecasters predicted the storm would make a gradual turn to the northwest today before coming ashore somewhere along a 350-mile stretch of the Texas and Louisiana coast that includes Port Arthur near the midpoint.
Forecasters warned of the possibility of a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet, battering waves, and rain of up to 15 inches along the Texas and western Louisiana coast.
The evacuation was a traffic nightmare, with red brakelights streaming out of Houston and its low-lying suburbs as far as the eye could see. Highways leading inland out of Houston, a metropolitan area of 4 million people about an hour’s drive from the shore, were clogged for up to 100 miles north of the city.
Drivers ran out of gas in 14-hour traffic jams or looked in vain for a place to stay as hotels filled up all the way to the Oklahoma and Arkansas line. Others got tired of waiting in traffic and turned around and went home.
State officials hoped to transport more than 200,000 gallons of gas to service stations that reported running out of fuel. Police officers and National Guard trucks carried gas to motorists whose tanks were on empty.
By late Thursday, the traffic bottlenecks were improving, with congestion easing on many major arteries leaving Houston, said Robert Black, spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry.
The traffic congestion extended well into Louisiana, with Interstate 10 jammed from Lake Charles through Baton Rouge. State police said the biggest backups were at exits where cars stacked up in long lines of motorists trying to get gasoline.
Rather than sit in traffic, some people walked their dogs, got out to stretch or switch drivers, or lounged in the beds of pickup trucks. Fathers and sons played catch on freeway medians. Some walked from car to car, chatting with others.
With temperatures in the 90s, many cars were overheating, as were some tempers.
“I’ve been screaming in the car,” said Abbie Huckleby, who was trapped on Interstate 45 with her husband and two children as they tried to get from the Houston suburb of Katy to Dallas, about 250 miles away. “It’s not working. If I would have known it was this bad, I would have stayed at home and rode out the storm at home.”
Trazanna Moreno decided to do just that. After leaving her Houston home and covering just six miles in nearly three hours, she finally gave up.
“It could be that if we ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere that we’d be in a worse position in a car dealing with hurricane-force winds than we would in our house,” she said.
To speed the evacuation, the governor halted all southbound traffic into Houston along I-45 and took the unprecedented step of opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston.
Residents also jammed Houston’s two major airports seeking flights inland, including many people who did not have reservations. “That is not going to happen,” said Richard Fernandez, a spokesman for the city’s aviation department.
Adding to problems was a shortage of security screeners, many of whom did not show up for work because they live in areas under mandatory evacuations. Airport officials flew in screeners from other Texas cities.
In Galveston, a city rebuilt after an unnamed 1900 hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 residents in what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the once-bustling tourist island was all but abandoned, with at least 90 percent off its 58,000 residents cleared out.
The city pinned its hopes on its 11-mile-long, 17-foot-high granite seawall to protect it from the storm surge, and a skeleton crew of police and firefighters to ward off potential looters.
“Whatever happens is going to happen and we are going to have a monumental task ahead of us once the storm passes,” said City Manager Steve LeBlanc. “Galveston is going to suffer and we are going to need to get it back in order as soon as possible.”
In New Orleans, Rita’s steady rains Thursday were the first measurable precipitation since Katrina. The forecast was for 3 to 5 inches in the coming days – dangerously close to the amount engineers said could send floodwaters pouring back into neighborhoods that have been dry for less than a week.
“Right now, it’s a wait-and-see and hope-for-the-best,” said Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which added sandbags to shore up levees and installed 60-foot sections of metal across some of the city’s canals to protect against storm surges.
But as the rain fell, there were ominous signs it might not be enough. In the city’s lower Ninth Ward, where water broke through a levee earlier this month and caused some of the worst flooding, there was standing water a foot deep in areas that were dry a day earlier.
Katrina’s death toll in Louisiana rose to 832 on Thursday, pushing the body count to at least 1,069 across the Gulf Coast. But workers under contract to the state to collect the bodies were taken off the streets of New Orleans because of the approaching storm.
In southwestern Louisiana, anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 residents along the state’s southwest coast were urged to evacuate and state officials planned to send in buses to take refugees, some of whom had already fled Katrina.
“Rita has Louisiana in her sights,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. “Head north. You cannot go east, you cannot go west. If you know the local roads that go north, take those.”
As for those who refuse to leave, she said: “Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms with indelible ink.”