Here we go again. Pray, y’all.
Hospital and nursing home patients were evacuated and others gathered up their belongings and began clearing out Wednesday as Hurricane Rita intensified into a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds and threatened to devastate the Texas coast or already-battered Louisiana by week’s end. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for Galveston and New Orleans, one day after Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys as a Category 2 storm, causing relatively minor damage.
Having seen what Hurricane Katrina did just three weeks ago, many people decided not to take any chances.
“After this killer in New Orleans, Katrina, I just cannot fathom staying,” 59-year-old Ldyyan Jean Jocque said before sunrise as she waited for an evacuation bus outside the Galveston Community Center. She had packed her Bible, some music and clothes into plastic bags and loaded her dog into a pet carrier.
The federal government was eager to show it, too, had learned its lesson after being criticized for its sluggish response to Katrina. It rushed hundreds of truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals to the Gulf Coast and put rescue and medical teams on standby.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff urged residents in the threatened areas to get out.
“You can’t play around with this storm,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He added: “The lesson is that when the storm hits, the best place to be is to be out of the path of the storm.”
At 11 a.m. EDT, Rita was centered about 260 miles west of Key West, Fla., and 775 miles southeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, moving west at near 13 mph. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore Saturday somewhere between northern Mexico and western Louisiana, most likely in Texas.
Meteorologist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Rita could strengthen to a Category 5 with wind over 155 mph as it moves over the warm waters of the gulf, or it could ease to a Category 3, with wind of less than 130 mph.
In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers raced to patch the city’s fractured levee system for fear the additional rain could swamp the walls and flood the city all over again. The Corps said New Orleans’ levees can only handle up to 6 inches of rain and a storm surge of 10 to 12 feet.
