Well, this certainly isn’t good news for my hometown of Angleton, Texas.
Gaining strength with frightening speed, Hurricane Rita swirled toward the Gulf Coast a Category 5, 175-mph monster today as more than 1.3 million people in Texas and Louisiana were sent packing on orders from authorities who learned a bitter lesson from Katrina.
“It’s scary. It’s really scary,” Shalonda Dunn said as she and her 5- and 9-year-old daughters waited to board a bus arranged by emergency authorities in Galveston. “I’m glad we’ve got the opportunity to leave. … You never know what can happen.”
With Rita projected to hit Texas by Saturday, Gov. Rick Perry urged residents along the state’s entire coast to begin evacuating. And New Orleans braced for the possibility that the storm could swamp the misery-stricken city all over again.
Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys and began drawing energy with terrifying efficiency from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 2 a.m. and 10 p.m., it went from a 115-mph Category 2 to a 175-mph Category 5.
Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the U.S. mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the U.S. mainland — most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.
Government officials eager to show they had learned their lessons from the sluggish response to Katrina sent in hundreds of buses to evacuate the poor, moved out hospital and nursing home patients, dispatched truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and put rescue and medical teams on standby. An Army general in Texas was told to be ready to assume control of a military task force in Rita’s wake.
“We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we got to be ready for the worst,” President Bush said in Washington.
By this evening, Rita was centered about 575 miles east-southeast of Galveston and about 670 miles east-southeast of Corpus Christi. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi.
I’ve just found out that Angleton is under mandatory evacuation.
Angleton Mayor Matt Sebesta has ordered a mandatory evacuation for the city at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
“People need to be out of town no later than noon Thursday,†Sebesta said.
Angleton Police Lt. Mike Jones, the city’s emergency management coordinator, said people do not need to wait until the evacuation goes into effect. County officials said trailers will not be restricted on evacuation routes.
Hey, Russ, Hollis, et al., head my way if you need digs to ride out the storm. The fiancee and I have you covered. Sure, we’re expected to get some major wind and rain in north Dallas on Saturday night, but I just bought season one of Battlestar Galactica. We’ll make the best of it. And, after all, as Phil points out at Shades of Gray, hotel space is already problematic for much of Texas thanks to Katrina.