Rita Lands Weakened Punch

Rita came ashore about 3:30 a.m. just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana border. It was a Category 3 hurricane, smacking into Lake Charles and neighboring Port Arthur, Tex., with wind, rain and a 15-foot storm surge, then churning northward up the Sabine River.

Beaumont, Tex., a town of 113,000 whose 1901 Spindletop oil strike turned the Houston area into the hub of America's petroleum industry, lost power early Saturday and had minor flooding and some lost roofs. Officials said tens of thousands of evacuees would be kept out of town until services had improved.

Farther east, damage was more severe. In Vidor, five miles from Beaumont, single-story apartments were flooded and trees punched holes in roofs. "It's bad. It's bad," said a policeman there, cruising slowly past the houses.

Boilermaker Keith Kirkland, 31, a Vidor resident, tried to flee but could not find a hotel for his wife and two young children. They returned to Vidor but had to abandon their 55-year-old frame house in favor of a Baptist church built of logs.

"My kids thought it was fun," Kirkland said, but "it was scary. We saw the storm moving big concrete pieces." Late Saturday morning, he splashed through the knee-high water to find his house -- amazingly -- still standing.

The area's major highway, Interstate 10, was blocked by fallen trees. A tractor-trailer lay on its side at midday, its turn signals still blinking. Farther north on Highway 69, gusty winds and heavy rain punished the small towns nestling in the piney woods near Jasper, Tex.

Motorists dodged large trees split by the storm or uprooted into the road. Vehicles parked off the highway were up to their steering wheels in floodwater. Many homes and businesses had shed roofs that slid along the rain-slick highways.

About 25 miles from Beaumont, Linda Stinson, 56, spent the night in an elementary school with her husband, a firefighter, an experience she did not plan to repeat: "The next time there's a storm, I'm going to get out of here," she said. "It sounded like a freight train."

Lake Charles was particularly hard-hit. On the approach to the city, water lapped at the first-floor windows of buildings, intersections were underwater, traffic lights hung precariously low, and three-foot-diameter trees bisected houses.

Brent McManus, 45, returned to find his lakefront home flooded to the second floor. His children's swing set and a six-foot-high fence had disappeared beneath the lake's surface. Federal authorities "told me this property was the fifth most likely to flood in Lake Charles," McManus acknowledged. "They wanted me to build it higher. I guess this time I will."

McManus's neighbor, Judson McCann, 69, stayed in his home through the storm, taking refuge in a room atop the garage: "It was very noisy and dark, and with the rain, you couldn't see across the lake," McCann said. "So I didn't know it was rising." When daylight finally arrived, he found the lake lapping at the garage.

"It was worse than I thought," Lake Charles resident Paul Tabarelli, 27, said. "The house was shaking." Tabarelli boarded up the outside of the house before taking refuge with two friends. A sheet-metal window guard clung to the side of the house bearing the spray-painted legend: "Three people inside."

Gugliotta reported from Washington. Staff writers Ceci Connolly in New Orleans, Blaine Harden in Jasper, Tex., Steve Hendrix in Austin, Arshad Mohammed in Washington and Ann Scott Tyson, aboard the USS Iwo Jima, contributed to this report.