Rita's wrath: Lessons of Katrina help evacuees

LAKE CHARLES, La. -- Hurricane Rita, packing 120-mph winds and torrential rains, bulldozed up the Texas-Louisiana corridor Saturday, leaving scarred countryside and mugged towns in its wake but apparently causing little, if any, loss of life.

Rita's footsteps included upturned trees, snapped utility poles and rising floodwaters as skirts of rain soaked low-lying areas. Satellite dishes, ripped from their moorings, skittered along rain- slicked highways like errant hockey pucks.

Survival in this vast region of bayous, piney woods, petrochemical plants and urban sprawl owed itself both to luck -- Rita came ashore in a relatively unpopulated area -- and to the fearsome example set by Hurricane Katrina, the killer storm that ripped through New Orleans and Mississippi's Gulf Coast less than four weeks ago, killing more than 1,000 people.

Chastened by Katrina memories, more than 3 million Texans and large numbers of Louisianans evacuated Houston, Galveston and dozens of smaller settlements in one of the biggest -- and fastest -- internal migrations in U.S. history, leaving Rita to howl its way through ghost towns.

"Everybody left," said Jason Stagg, 34, working with a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries boat crew in this battered Gulf Coast port town and tourist destination, which the eye of the hurricane passed near just before dawn. "We haven't had to rescue anyone."

Fears of renewed tragedy rose in New Orleans when hastily repaired levees breached during Katrina fell apart again during Rita's first surge Friday, once again flooding parts of New Orleans's Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

But no further damage was reported, and the Army Corps of Engineers worked to plug the new gaps Saturday, rolling large boulders into the breaches on either side of the Industrial Canal, then sending Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound bags of sand into the stricken dikes.

By late Saturday the virtue of last week's mass exodus in Texas was fast becoming a vice. People wanted to come home, and they were ignoring Gov. Rick Perry's admonition "that if you're in a safe place, with food, water and bedding, you're better off staying in place. Now is no time for Texans to let their guard down."

Instead, motorists flooded the highways, destined for largely undamaged Houston and Galveston, and gridlock threatened. Steve McCraw, Texas director of homeland security, pleaded with evacuees to get off the roads so state police could help Rita victims at the Louisiana border and beyond, instead of remaining behind to unsnarl traffic jams.

By Saturday evening, the only reported death was in Mississippi, where one person was killed by a tornado that spun off the remains of the hurricane. However, during the evacuation Friday -- before the storm made landfall -- 24 evacuees from a nursing home died when a bus caught fire on I-45 near Dallas.

"The objective today is immediate response," said Jack Colley, Texas coordinator for the Governor's Division of Emergency Management. "That's medical assessment, food, water, ice and communications -- making contact with local officials and re- establishing continuity of government."

Late Saturday, Rita had been downgraded to a tropical storm but ominously hovered over Shreveport, La., and began to spread out. "The risk now is from heavy rains," said meteorologist Chris Landsea in a telephone interview from the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "We may see up to 25 inches in east Texas, western Louisiana and southern Arkansas."

If the storm stalls, Colley said, the affected area would include 64,000 square miles of east Texas in 80 counties with 11.3 million people. Texas may soon be dealing with "an entirely different disaster," he said, "a heavy flood." The National Weather Service warned of possible "catastrophic river flooding," as runoff from "torrential rains" fans out over the coastal plain.

But initial reports from relief officials and service providers Saturday were mostly positive. Telephone networks in Texas and Louisiana appeared to have held up relatively well. SBC Communications Inc., the largest provider in Texas, had only one station -- in Sabine Pass -- out of operation, while Sprint Nextel Corp. reported about 4 percent of its 360,000 local telephone lines affected.

Dan Packer, CEO of the power company Entergy New Orleans, reported that 800,000 of its customers, primarily in Texas and Louisiana, were without electricity, but about 200,000 of these first lost electricity during Katrina. In all, about 1.1 million customers in the region were without power.

Also dodging a major casualty was the region's oil industry. At least four refineries reported some damage, but estimates of insured losses, which had been as high as $18 billion Friday, were reduced - - some as low as $2.5 billion. Energy analysts said the impact on gasoline prices over the coming weeks should be minimal.

President Bush, trying to overcome criticism of the federal government response to Katrina, rode out Rita at Peterson Air Force Base, headquarters of the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, then flew to Austin and San Antonio.