Rita Lands Weakened Punch

Catastrophe Is Avoided, but Wary Eyes Look to Flooding

LAKE CHARLES, La., Sept. 24 -- Hurricane Rita, packing 120-mph winds and torrential rains, bulldozed up the Texas-Louisiana corridor Saturday, leaving scarred countryside and mugged towns in its wake, but apparently causing little loss of life.

Rita's footsteps left behind upturned trees, snapped utility poles and rising floodwaters as skirts of rain soaked low-lying areas. Satellite dishes, ripped from their moorings, skittered along rain-slicked highways like errant hockey pucks.

Survival in this vast region of bayous, piney woods, petrochemical plants and urban sprawl owed itself both to luck -- Rita came ashore in a relatively unpopulated area -- and to the fearsome example set by Hurricane Katrina, the storm that killed more than 1,000 people when it ripped through New Orleans and Mississippi's Gulf Coast less than four weeks ago.

Chastened by Katrina memories, more than 3 million Texans and large numbers of Louisianans evacuated Houston, Galveston and dozens of smaller settlements in one of the biggest -- and fastest -- internal migrations in U.S. history, leaving Rita to howl its way through ghost towns.

"Everybody left," said Jason Stagg, 34, working with a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries boat crew in this battered Gulf Coast port town and tourist destination, near which the eye of the hurricane passed just before dawn. "We haven't had to rescue anyone."

Fears of renewed tragedy rose in New Orleans when hastily repaired levees breached during Katrina fell apart again during Rita's first surge Friday, once again flooding parts of New Orleans's Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

But no further damage was reported, and the Army Corps of Engineers worked to plug the new gaps Saturday, rolling large boulders into the breaches on either side of the Industrial Canal, then sending Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound bags of sand into the stricken dikes.

Still, engineers kept a careful eye on Lake Pontchartrain, which had risen four feet above the water levels inside the city's flood walls and levees. Ben Morris, the mayor of Slidell, a small community on the lake's eastern end, warned on local television that the lake could spill into low-lying neighborhoods.

By late Saturday the virtue of the mass exodus in Texas was fast becoming a vice. People wanted to come home, and they were ignoring Gov. Rick Perry's admonition "that if you're in a safe place, with food, water and bedding, you're better off staying in place. Now is no time for Texans to let their guard down."

Instead, motorists flooded the highways, destined for largely undamaged Houston and Galveston. Steve McCraw, Texas director of homeland security, pleaded with evacuees to get off the roads so state police could help Rita victims at the Louisiana border and beyond, instead of remaining behind to unsnarl traffic jams.

"We know that no one has lost his life, which is good news -- the objective today is immediate response," said Jack Colley, Texas coordinator for the Governor's Division of Emergency Management. "That's medical assessment, food, water, ice and communications -- making contact with local officials and reestablishing continuity of government."

Late Saturday, Rita was downgraded to a tropical depression and was 40 miles north of Shreveport, La.