Rita makes approach

Roadways along the Gulf Coast were jammed once again Thursday as the second major hurricane in less than a month forced evacuations from coastal Texas and Louisiana.

The outermost bands of Hurricane Rita were brushing the coast of Louisiana by Thursday afternoon as the massive storm moved across the Gulf.

Forecasters expect Rita to make landfall early Saturday morning somewhere between Galveston, Texas, and the Texas-Louisiana border, and the storm isn't likely to shift course.

 

"Our confidence is relatively high with the path we're looking at right now," said Rick Smith, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service southern regional headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.

The storm is so large that residents well outside the storm's predicted track can expect to feel its effects, Smith said.

"It'll be a widespread area of tropical storm and hurricane-force winds," he said. "I think it's a pretty comprehensive threat."

Officials in Texas and Louisiana have given every indication that they are taking the threat seriously.

A massive evacuation is under way from coastal communities in Texas and southwestern Louisiana as hundreds of thousands of residents heed the call to evacuate inland. Highways leading out of Houston were accepting only northbound traffic as of Thursday afternoon, with southbound lanes opened up to speed the city's evacuation.

Despite scenes of seemingly endless traffic jams with Rita's landfall still almost two days away, officials said the scale of the exodus meant an early start was important.

"If the demand is great, you need to provide sufficient time for the infrastructure to handle it," said Andrew Ballard, a research engineer for the Texas Transportation Institute. "- And that's why the watchword has been: evacuate early."

Ballard said the fact that so many people were leaving Houston - a city 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico - indicates that residents are taking the storm very seriously.

"That's a good thing, and it's a result of getting the word out early, and it's a result of people believing the message," he said. "That is to some degree a result of the recent Katrina experience being fresh in the minds of the community."

Katrina was all too fresh in the minds of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which spent Thursday racing to reinforce the levees around New Orleans.

Even though the threat of a direct hit from Rita seems to have passed for the Big Easy, there are concerns that substantial rainfall from the hurricane could once again breach the city's weakened levees. A mandatory evacuation was in effect for the city.

Though Rita was downgraded to a Category 4 hurricane Thursday afternoon, Smith said the distinction would matter little to those in the storm's path.

"It's still a very intense and strong hurricane," he said. "There is not a lot of difference between a Category 4 and a Category 5 as far the damage it'll produce."

 

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.