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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Landfall
Posted By: Capt Patrick McCrary
Date: Saturday, 24 September 2005, at 5:48 a.m.
Source: Houston Chronicle
Sept. 24, 2005, 4:40AM
Rita landfall east of Sabine Pass
By TIM WHITMIRE
Associated PressBEAUMONT — Hurricane Rita, a Category 3 storm, made landfall at 2:30 a.m. just east of Sabine Pass on the southeast Texas coast, bringing with it a 20-foot storm surge and up to 25 inches of rain.
The storm, which still has sustained 120 mph winds, was moving toward the northwest near 12 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. Landfall was about 80 miles east of Galveston.
The hurricane center corrected the landfall time from 2:38 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. per radar reports and Air Force Reserve hurricane hunters.
The storms slow march spread worries it would dump nearly 2 feet of rain on flood-prone parts of Texas and Louisiana, spurring tornadoes as it churned north-northwest.
Rita's heaviest rains - up to 3 to 4 inches an hour - fell in Lake Charles, La., as the storm made landfall, National Weather Service meteorologist Patrick Omundson of Shreveport said. Other heavy rain was falling in a band from Woodville, Texas, east to Leesville-Alexandria in Louisiana at a rate of about one-half inch per hour.
High winds in southeast Louisiana knocked over old live oaks and lashed the low-lying landscape with driving winds.
Officials estimated at least 90 percent of surrounding Jefferson County, Texas, residents had heeded warnings that a storm surge could submerge swaths of the low-lying county - including the seawall-and-levee-protected city of Port Arthur, near Sabine Pass.
Windows blew out in the lobby of a hotel in Beaumont, about 30 miles inland from where the storm made landfall, and shards of glass and pieces of trees were strewn throughout the flooding lobby, KHOU-TV reported.
As the storm raged, the torches of oil refineries could still be seen burning in the distance from downtown Beaumont. Officials worried about the storm's threat to those facilities and chemical plants strung along the Texas and Louisiana coast.
The facilities represent a quarter of the nation's oil refining capacity and business analysts said damage from Rita could send gas prices as high as $4 (a gallon). Environmentalists warned of the risk of a toxic spill.
In Houston, CenterPoint Energy officials reported that about 500,000 regional customers were without power at 3:20 a.m. - about one-quarter of their customers. The company's service area stretches from Galveston into Houston north to Humble.
Entergy spokesman David Caplan said about 55,000 of its Texas customers in the storm-affected area were without electricity.
Patricia Frank, CenterPoint spokeswoman, said outages were heaviest in southern areas earlier in the evening, but then shifted to neighborhoods in the Humble and Kingwood areas, which, she noted, have many trees.
Frank said it was too early to assess the damage - and the amount of time it would take for repairs - but added that crews will be out at first light or when conditions are safe to begin work.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami had no information about conditions in Lake Charles at landfall. ``Those sensors went down'' several hours earlier, meteorologist Dave Roberts said.
But Rita's heaviest rains - up to 3 to 4 inches an hour - fell in Lake Charles as the storm made landfall, National Weather Service meteorologist Patrick Omundson of Shreveport said.
Beyond Lake Charles, Omundson says the heaviest rain was falling in a band from Woodville, Texas, east to Leesville-Alexandria in Louisiana at a rate of about one-half inch per hour.
Rita weakened during the day into a Category 3 hurricane after raging as a Category 5, 175-mph monster earlier in the week. But it was still a highly dangerous storm.
The weather service has issued a flood watch for 11 southeast Texas counties, including Brazoria, Chambers, Galveston, Harris, Liberty and Montgomery, along and east of the Interstate 45 corridor through 4 p.m. today. Rainfall totals of 2 to 6 inches are possible.
And a regional inland hurricane warning has been downgraded to an inland tropical storm warning until 4 p.m. in Harris and seven other regional counties. Tropical storm force winds out of the north, greater than 39 mph, will continue spreading inland tonight.
Winds are expected to subside below tropical storm force this afternoon.
Rita threatened dozens of shuttered refineries and chemical plants along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast that represent a quarter of the nation's oil refining capacity. Environmentalists warned of the risk of a toxic spill, and business analysts said Rita could cause already-high gasoline prices to rise to as much as $4 a gallon.
"We're going to get through this," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said. "Be calm, be strong, say a prayer for Texas."
In the storm near Port Arthur, a city of about 58,000 where the main industries include oil, shrimping and crawfishing; and Beaumont, a port city of about 114,000 that was the birthplace of the modern oil industry. It was in Beaumont that the Spindletop well erupted in a 100-foot gusher in 1901 and created such giants as Gulf, Humble and Texaco.
Nearly 1,300 patients were airlifted out of an airport near Beaumont in a rush Thursday night and Friday morning, but only after the county's top official made a panicked call to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson for help.
``We had patients throwing up. It was very ugly,'' said Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, who blamed delays on the Transportation Security Administration, which insisted every wheelchair-bound passenger be checked with a metal-detector.
As clouds thickened over Beaumont and Port Arthur on Friday afternoon and rain began to fall, only a handful of residents were still in what had become near-ghost towns. About 95,000 homes and businesses in Texas lost power, most along the coast.
Kandy Huffman had no way to leave, and she pushed her broken-down car down the street to her home with plans to ride out the storm in Port Arthur, where the streetlights were turned off and stores were boarded up.
"This isn't my first rodeo. All you can do is pray for best," she said as a driving rain started to fall. "We're surrounded by the people we love. Even if we have to all cuddle up, we know where everybody is."
In Tyler, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, officials said their shelters were full and refugees who continued to arrive from the south were being directed elsewhere. About 3,700 people were housed in 23 packed county shelters.
Even before the storm hit, the state estimated damages would reach $8.2 billion. Jack Colley, Texas' emergency management coordinator, said the hurricane would affect 5.2 million Texans in 19 counties, destroy nearly 5,700 homes and generate 26 million tons of debris.
He said parts of Beaumont and Port Arthur could be underwater for up to seven days after the storm if the Neches and Sabine rivers flood, and Tyler, Angelina and Nacogdoches counties could see up to 25 inches of rain.
"You're going to have the New Orleans effect not from the dikes but from the rivers," Colley said.
In New Orleans, which had just drained nearly all the putrid floodwaters from Katrina, Rita's wind and rain sent water gushing through a patched levee along the Industrial Canal and into the already-devastated Lower Ninth Ward and parts of neighboring St. Bernard Parish. The water rose to waist level.
About the same time, water streamed through another levee along the patched London Avenue Canal, swamping homes in the Gentilly neighborhood with 6 to 8 inches of water.
"Our worst fears came true," said Maj. Barry Guidry, a National Guardsman on duty at the broken levee in the Ninth Ward.
Refugees from the misery-stricken neighborhood learned of the crisis with despair.
"It's like looking at a murder," Quentrell Jefferson said as he watched the news at a church in Lafayette, 125 miles west of New Orleans. "The first time is bad. After that, you numb up."
President Bush, mindful of criticism the federal government was slow to respond to Katrina, planned to visit Texas today. He will go to the state's emergency operations center in Austin and then to San Antonio.
At least 2.5 million people fled a 500-mile stretch of the Louisiana-Texas coastline in a seemingly all-at-once evacuation that caused monumental traffic jams in which hundreds of cars broke down or ran out of gas. The Houston area highways were nearly desolate by midday Friday, but traffic was still steady from the outskirts of Houston toward Austin and Dallas.
Downtown Beaumont was all but deserted, with buildings boarded up and practically nothing moving but windblown plastic bags. On the horizon, covered in gray clouds, refinery torches belched black smoke.
Jefferson County's Griffith estimated that 10 to 15 percent of people had stayed in the county of 260,000, most in private homes.
About 90 percent of Galveston's 58,000 residents had cleared out, with the rest left to the mercy of a 17-foot seawall that was built after a 1900 hurricane that killed 6,000 to 12,000 of the island's residents in what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
"I'd rather die in my house than on the street," Linda Rieffannacht said as Rita's outer bands began pushing waves onto the seawall. "This way they will know where I am."
Mayors of small cities in Galveston County instituted dusk-to-dawn curfews "until further notice" as a crime prevention measure. The cities under curfew include La Marque, Texas City, Galveston, League City and Friendswood as well as the unincorporated areas of Galveston County.
In Lake Charles, home to the nation's 12th-largest seaport and refineries run by ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corp., Citgo and Shell, nearly all 70,000 residents had evacuated. Several riverboat casinos that mostly serve tourists from Texas also closed ahead of the storm.
"We see these storms a little differently after Katrina," said city administrator Paul Rainwater. "We all realize that no matter how safe you feel ... you have to take it seriously, you have to plan."
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said more than 90 percent of residents in southwestern parishes, about 150,000 people, had evacuated. For those who had not, she issued a warning: "You need to find a safe place to be. It is not safe to find yourself stranded on the highway. Get to the highest ground or the highest building in your area."
Because of the approaching storm, authorities called off the search for bodies from Katrina, and the death toll across the Gulf Coast stood at 1,079, including 841 in Louisiana.
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