HURRICANE SLAMS INTO GULF COAST; FLOODING FEARED
September 25, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN and WILLIAM YARDLEY
BEAUMONT, Tex., Sept. 24 - Hurricane Rita, with an eye 20 miles wide and wind gusts of almost 150 miles per hour, slammed into the Gulf Coast before dawn on Saturday, causing far less damage than officials had feared but raising new concerns that its torrential rain and storm surges would cause widespread flooding across much of the region.
Despite property destruction expected to reach into the billions of dollars, preliminary reports indicated that Hurricane Rita was far less deadly than its predecessor, Hurricane Katrina. Officials said that was partly because of the evacuation of millions of Gulf Coast residents who heeded warnings, mindful of the flooding, death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina only a month ago.
The storm appeared to have spared major damage to Houston, where 2.5 million residents choked roadways for hours as they fled the approach of the storm. But Mayor Bill White warned that it was still unsafe to return because of rain and high winds.
Hurricane Rita made landfall about 3:40 a.m. Eastern time as a Category 3 storm, with winds up to 130 m.p.h., with its eye passing just east of Sabine Pass, Tex., about 32 miles southeast of Beaumont and near the Texas-Louisiana border. After hitting land, the storm weakened to a Category 2, which carries winds up to 110 m.p.h., but it still carried hurricane-force winds deep into the inland portion of East Texas.
President Bush, who was criticized for his administration's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, monitored the approach of Hurricane Rita from the United States Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colo.
James Gunter, the fire chief in Jasper, Tex., a small town about 70 miles north of the coast, said in a interview with KHOU-TV early in the morning: "We've had fires in the county that we have not been able to respond to - won't be able to respond to, period. The entire county is without power."
Chief Gunter added, "We can go out on the south side of our building and we can look to the south and we can see nothing less than utter devastation."
Forecasters said that they expected the remnants of Hurricane Rita to stall over the region for three to five days, creating up to 25 inches of rain.
Forecasters also warned that the greatest damage could come from an unrelenting rainfall that could hang over the region for days and from flood tides up to 15 feet high that could inundate stretches of the Gulf Coast across Texas and Louisiana.
Rainfall will continue to affect mainly the eastern half of southeast Texas, with the heaviest rains pounding Liberty and Chambers Counties, where forecasters said flooding of low-lying areas was expected.
Early Saturday morning, water levels were receding in the upper and middle portions of Galveston Bay as strong winds were pushing the water southward, causing it to pile up across bayside locations of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula. Forecasters said the flooding further west along Galveston Island, along the north facing bay shores, was expected to subside by midday.
In New Orleans, water that topped two repaired canal levees in the Ninth Ward on Friday because of rain and wind as Hurricane Rita approached began to recede somewhat on Saturday.
The Army Corps of Engineers said water had dropped just over a foot in the Industrial Canal by Saturday morning. Plans were being made for helicopters to drop 3,000-pound to 7,000-pound sandbags into a 25 to 30-foot gap where water still flowed into the evacuated Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods that had previously been battered by Hurricane Katrina.
"We just have to get clearance with Mother Nature," said Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the corps.
The worst damage from Hurricane Rita appeared to be in southwestern Louisiana and East Texas. But the storm also sparked fires in Galveston and Houston, and overcame fragile levees in New Orleans. Nearly a million utility customers, including 575,000 in Houston and 250,000 along the coast, lost power. In Lake Charles, La., early unconfirmed reports told of heavy damage to the glass facade of the Hibernia Bank tower downtown, potential damage to casino barges on Lake Charles and a fallen overpass on either Interstate 10 or a spur to the south of town, Interstate 210.
Parts of Beaumont were flooded and there were indications that water had been swept around Port Arthur's horseshoe-shape sea wall. One resident of Orange, a town just to the northeast, called the courthouse to say she was climbing into her attic to escape rising water.
Glass blew out of the J.P. Morgan/Chase Tower in downtown Houston, forcing the police to cordon off the area.
In coastal counties and parishes, crews of workers rose in the dark and prepared to go out at first light to assess the damage, while inland Texas counties like Jasper were still under siege by the storm.
"We're in the process of going through the eye right now, so we've got a lot of rough times ahead," Diane Brown, the acting Jasper County jail administrator, said when she answered the telephone at the sheriff's office early Saturday morning.
In Louisiana, officials from Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes huddled in the Calcasieu Parish jail, which had been evacuated of all 1,149 inmates before the storm. About 3 a.m. on Saturday, wind rattled the roof and windows. "That's the sound of our lives changing forever," said Mike Aymond, a deputy with the Calcasieu Parish sheriff's office.
But, Deputy Aymond said, "It'd be a lot worse if New Orleans hadn't happened. People would have stayed."
In Jefferson County, which includes Beaumont and Port Arthur, Carl Griffith, the county judge, estimated that only 10 percent to 15 percent of the county's 250,000 residents had stayed behind, compared with 40 percent in previous evacuations. In Cameron Parish, a low-lying area of bayous, blue herons, farmland and fishing camps just south of Lake Charles, La., nearly all of the 9,000 residents had evacuated by late Friday. About 95 percent of the 200,000 residents in Calcasieu Parish, which includes Lake Charles, had evacuated, officials estimated.
In Beaumont, windows blew out of the ground floor of the Entergy building, which the county was using as a shelter and staging area for first responders, causing a drop in pressure throughout the building, downtown's tallest. As the first rescue workers left, the wind still drove horizontal shears of rain and shook cars.
The Houston police had confirmed 28 burglaries overnight and arrested 16 people, said Frank Michel, a spokesman for Mayor White. Eight of those arrested - four juveniles, three women and one man - were accused of looting a Target store. Three were arrested at a business on the city's southwest side and one person was caught stealing beer from a convenience store, the police said.
Residents who had not evacuated were warned by the National Hurricane Center to remain in place until Hurricane Rita moved farther inland, because travel, especially in cars, would be dangerous. In most evacuated areas, officials said it was not safe to return, except in Friendswood, Tex., a suburb of Houston.
On Saturday, Army helicopter crews from the First Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Tex., began flying Federal Emergency Management Agenty teams whose job it is to gauge damage from the hurricane.
"The air crews are facilitating the movement of personnel to conduct assessments of the conditions in anticipation of the relief effort," said Maj. Greg Thompson, the First Air Cavalry Brigade executive officer. "In the next 48 hours, we anticipate sending up to an additional dozen aircraft to support in relief efforts after the storm. Our initial missions will be to get FEMA assessment experts in to assess the areas hardest hit by the storm."
The military also sent five mortuary teams from New Orleans to Fort Sam Houston, Tex., and five other teams were placed on alert, according to a statement from the Northern Command, which manages the Pentagon's efforts in domestic emergency and relief missions. Those teams help recover and transport the dead.
By early Saturday, more than 50 helicopters, as well as other surveillance and transport planes, were available for damage assessment and search and rescue missions, according to a Northern Command statement. The military was also supplying communications systems for use by civilian emergency workers and federal disaster-relief agencies. Included in the communications systems are commercial telephone, Internet, teleconferencing, radio and satellite telephone systems.
Northern Command officials said that 800 marines based aboard the Iwo Jima were available for assistance, and that more than 300 military medical personnel were ready to open 10 field medical shelters throughout the hurricane zone. The military was also prepared to supply 500,000 meals per day to more than 15 locations, if required.
The military announced late Friday that it had established Joint Task Force Rita, to be overseen by Lt. Gen. Robert T. Clark, commander of the Fifth Army.
Shaila Dewan reported from Beaumont, Tex., for this article, and William Yardley from Lake Charles, La., Timothy Williams from Beaumont and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.
• Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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