The Federal Emergency Management Agency positioned 45 truckloads of water and ice and 25 truckloads of Meals Ready to Eat at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. More than 400 medical workers and 14 urban search-and-rescue teams, comprising 744 people, have been stationed in Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.
"The most important thing that we're doing is work with the Department of Defense to use their assets up front before the storm instead of waiting until after the storm lands," said acting FEMA Director R. David Paulison. Earlier this week, a military satellite communications system was shipped to New Orleans.
FEMA also asked the Pentagon to provide 26 helicopters to ferry people and supplies, five two-person communications teams for first responders, temporary hospital beds for 2,500 patients and field kitchens capable of serving 500,000 meals a day.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta assembled four teams of 20 to deploy after Rita makes landfall, Tom Skinner, an agency spokesman, said. The CDC has three dozen staffers in Texas as part of its Katrina recovery effort, providing care at shelters, hospitals and local health departments.
After suffering sizable losses in Katrina, several oil refineries shut down Wednesday, pulling hundreds of workers from rigs off the Texas shore. The Texas area accounts for about one-quarter of the nation's total crude oil production.
In New Orleans, pockets of rescue workers and cleanup crews kept watch on the weather map even as they struggled to restore critical services in a metropolitan area that just one month ago bustled with 1.3 million residents and thousands of revenue-generating tourists. A team of seven Public Health Service doctors and nurses planned to stay in New Orleans through Rita, but about 45 CDC employees relocated to Baton Rouge.
Louisiana state officials were moving about 75 homebound patients from "special needs" shelters in Lafayette and Thibodaux to centers in Monroe and Shreveport, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
Still, even going more than weeks without power, water or sewer service were not enough to uproot some here. After surviving the Mariel boatlift from Cuba in 1980 and Katrina on Aug. 29, Jose Mendez, 66, said he was not frightened by Rita.
Speaking in Spanish in his mildewed apartment near the New Orleans Fairgrounds horse-racing track, Mendez smiled: "I know how to deal with water."
Moreno reported from Austin. Staff writers Manuel Roig-Franzia in New Orleans, Blaine Harden in Houston and Christopher Lee, Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott Tyson in Washington also contributed to this report.
Rita Churns Toward Texas
