Hours before D-Day, Texas braces for Rita

Rita was expected to make landfall early on Saturday near the Texas and Louisiana border, the National Hurricane Center said. It said the Category 4 storm may weaken to a Category 3 by landfall, but would still come ashore as a major hurricane.

‘‘Be calm, be strong, say a prayer for Texas,’’ Texas Governor Rick Perry said in the state capital of Austin.

In New Orleans, water spilled over a freshly patched levee into a hard-hit neighbourhood as Rita’s outer edge dumped rain on a city left nearly deserted after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation last month.

In Texas, the storm would cause a ‘‘catastrophic flood’’ likely to inundate the city of Port Arthur under a 6- to 7- metre storm surge, said Jack Colley, the director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. With 16 hours of hurricane-force winds, Rita would affect 5.2 million Texans, destroy 6,000 homes and have an initial economic impact of $8.2 billion, he predicted.

As authorities struggled to complete one of the largest evacuations in US history in the final hours before Rita’s landfall, the problems underscored that despite years of planning for a major emergency after September 11, 2001, attacks, a fast evacuation of a large urban area cannot be ensured.

More than 2 million people were leaving the Gulf coastal areas and Houston, the fourth-largest US city with a metropolitan population of 4 million, was deserted.

People trying to escape Houston crowded inland-bound highways and sat for hours in enormous traffic jams on Thursday and struggled to find gasoline. Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc. said its stations in the area had run out of fuel.

As of 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), Rita’s centre was about 355 km southeast of Galveston and about 338 km southeast of Port Arthur. The storm was moving northwest near 16 kph toward the southwest Louisiana and upper Texas coasts.

Bush to skip Texas visit

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush cancelled his trip to Texas on Friday to avoid interfering with the move of a search-and-rescue team closer to where Hurricane Rita was to hit, the White House said. Instead of traveling to San Antonio, Bush was to go straight to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to visit the US Northern Command. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said when the Federal Emergency Management Agency decided to move the team, “ we didn’t want to slow that decision up in any way“. REUTERS