Rita downgraded but still 'extremely dangerous'

Thousands of vehicles slowly make their way out of Houston, Texas heading north to escape Hurricane Rita. Picture / Reuters

Hurricane Rita weakened to a Category 4 storm with winds at 240km/h today but remained an extremely dangerous storm, the US National Hurricane Center said.


It forecast the storm would hit near the Houston area, the heart of the US oil industry, as a dangerous hurricane of at least Category 3 intensity early on Saturday.


All of the major weather models forecast the storm should strike between the Houston area and the Texas-Louisiana border.Yesterday evacuation orders were issued for more than a million people.

The storm had grown into the third most intense Atlantic hurricane on record as measured by internal pressure, the US National Hurricane Centre said.

The hurricane centre said Rita was "a potentially catastrophic" category 5 hurricane at the time with maximum sustained winds rising to 280km/h over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That matched the peak strength over water of last month's devastating Hurricane Katrina, which hit land as a category 4 storm with 230km/h winds.

A hurricane watch was issued for the US Gulf Coast from Fort Mansfield, Texas, to Cameron, Louisiana. Rita was expected to come ashore as a "major hurricane ... at [category 3] or higher", hurricane centre forecaster Robbie Berg said. President George W. Bush declared emergencies for Texas and Louisiana.

"Federal, state and local governments are co-ordinating their efforts to get ready," said President Bush, who was heavily criticised for an ill-prepared federal response to Hurricane Katrina last month that killed more than 1000 people.

"We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we've got to be ready for the worst," the President said.

Rita lashed the Florida Keys on Tuesday but did little damage to the vulnerable Florida islands.

Rita's path included the Texas coast southwest of Galveston, where in 1900 at least 8000 people died in the deadliest recorded US hurricane.

Just last month, Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and killed at least 1037 people.

Financial markets reacted immediately to news the storm had gained strength, with the prospect of more destruction and oil-supply interruptions affecting everything from stocks and the dollar to oil prices.

Galveston, a city of about 58,000 people located on a barrier island, began evacuating residents on Tuesday. More than 80km inland, Houston Mayor Bill White ordered an evacuation of residents in areas prone to storm surges or major floods.

Officials said as many as 1.2 million people were expected to start leaving Houston, America's fourth most populous city and an international centre for the oil industry. The city was the most popular destination for evacuees from Katrina, which displaced about 1 million people, including nearly all of New Orleans' 450,000 residents.

The area's geography makes evacuation particularly tricky. While many hurricane-prone cities are right on the coast, Houston is about 100km inland, so a coastal suburban area of 2 million people must evacuate through a metropolitan area of 4 million people where the freeways are often clogged under the best of circumstances.

Shops in Houston quickly ran out of emergency supplies, plywood and food. The last major hurricane to hit Houston was Alicia in 1983, a category 3 storm that killed 22 people. Texas Governor Rick Perry urged Texans along a 480km stretch comprising most of the state's coastline to leave.

The Mexican Government issued a tropical storm watch for the country's northeast coast from Rio San Fernando northward.

"Everyone's scared, that's why we're all leaving," Galveston Island resident Maria Stephens said. Nasa has ordered the evacuation of the Johnson Space Centre in Houston and turned over control of the International Space Station to Russia.

- REUTERS