Flooding, and Relief, in Rita’s Wake

Hurricane Rita spread watery desolation anew across Louisiana on Saturday, rolling over bayou country on the southwest coast and trapping hundreds on rooftops. Texas was spared widespread destruction, but some shoreline oil towns struggled with high water and wind damage.

At least 1,000 Louisiana residents were rescued by Coast Guard helicopter teams and volunteers in airboats. But as daylight faded, hundreds more remained atop buildings, water levels rising.

Despite the dire situation in southwest Louisiana and across the Sabine River into east Texas, authorities were relieved that Houston and cities along the vulnerable coastline in both states appeared to have been spared widespread destruction.

“The damage is not as severe as we expected it to be,” said R. David Paulison, the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He credited the evacuation of nearly 3 million people in Texas and as many as 1 million in Louisiana with preventing widespread deaths.

Authorities said a tornado killed one person in the Mississippi Delta. In the storm’s direct path, no other fatalities and few injuries were initially reported.

In New Orleans, low-lying wards suffered more flooding Saturday after rain overtopped a canal levee. Officials predicted a quick recovery. But there was achingly familiar havoc in the southern New Orleans suburb of Lafitte, where rescuers on boats aided more than 500 people stranded on roofs and second-floor landings by floodwaters rising from the Barataria Bay Waterway.

The Houston area had minimal flooding and some downed power lines. Texans were impatient to return, but emergency officials urged them to stay off roads and avoid the chaos that snarled their evacuation Wednesday.

As daylight dimmed over southwest Louisiana, Coast Guard helicopters and search teams in power boats answered dozens of 911 calls. Scores of residents were isolated in their homes by 15-foot-high storm surges.

“Southwest Louisiana has certainly been assaulted by Hurricane Rita, and southeast Louisiana is taking on water,” said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. “Hurricane Rita has compounded Louisiana’s pain.”

The hurricane’s fraying core roared ashore before dawn. A Category 5 giant that had filled half of the Gulf of Mexico with 175 mph winds two days earlier, it made landfall as a Category 3 storm just after 2:40 a.m. CDT Saturday over the Sabine River along the border between Louisiana and Texas.

Rita weakened to a tropical storm as it moved north toward Arkansas, throwing off funnel clouds and torrential rain expected to total as much as 2 feet over the next several days. More than a million people were without electricity. Tall pines and oaks flew; surf inundated fishing towns, sugarcane fields and bayous.

Floodwaters swiftly rose 9 feet in the southern Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 25 miles inside Lafayette Parish. Several miles to the west, sheriff’s deputies in Cameron Parish watched in awe as appliances and crumbled houses floated off in the Intracoastal Waterway.

More than a third of Cameron Parish was underwater Saturday, its bayous covered by a vast plain of seawater from Vermilion Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Entire towns were gone, among them Intracoastal City, Esther, Henry, Erath, Forked Island, Pecan Island and Mouton Cove.

“It was storm surge,” said Sheriff Michael Couvillon. “It broke protection levees and washed out bridges.” Water rose at least 2 feet an hour Saturday afternoon, he said.

Most of Cameron Parish’s 10,000 residents were gone. They left Thursday, driven by images of Hurricane Katrina and of Hurricane Audrey, a 1957 storm that deluged the parish, killing 425.

Deserted Abbeville -- population 11,600 until Friday -- became the staging ground for a rescue operation in nearby Vermilion Parish, a rice farming area where hundreds of Acadian residents had tried to ride out Rita. People were also rescued in St. Mary and Iberia parishes.

About 500 people had been rescued by dusk Saturday. Michael Bertrand, a voting registrar who was drafted to head the parish’s rescue operation, estimated that 200 to 300 people remained stranded overnight.

Complicating the operation, he said, were several thousand evacuees lined up in cars on the outskirts of the parish, determined to return to see their homes though floodwaters still rose.

Earlier in the day, authorities had put out an urgent call for volunteers with boats to come to the Abbeville Courthouse. About 60 volunteers soon pulled in. The rescue paused when boats caught on submerged fences and spun in strong winds and high tides.

“We’ve had a couple of boats capsize,” said Sheriff Michael Couvillon. “We’re going to let the surge die down and the wind die down so we don’t lose our own.”

By 4:15 p.m., military helicopters hovered over the parish and boats were making progress. At least 100 people were plucked from attics and roofs.

At nightfall, about 25 residents were still awaiting rescue, Couvillon said, because helicopters were at risk in the dark.

Diana Toucket, 52, a mother of three, said she and her husband were waist-deep in her trailer home when rescuers arrived. They left with clothes and a cellphone. “I’m just tired of running, tired of leaving,” she said. “Every hurricane they say you have to leave. I told my husband that if it gets up to 10 feet, then we go.”

Officials said more than 10 feet of water could sweep over some southwest Louisiana towns by early this morning, but they expected the surge to begin to retreat later in the day.

To the west, along East Texas’ oil coast, refineries and petrochemical plants remained shuttered. Two cooling towers and a flare stack at Valero Energy Corp.’s refinery in Port Arthur sustained wind damage and will need at least two weeks for repairs, officials said -- a hint of the disturbance that the region’s storm-dormant billion-dollar oil industry may suffer.

Nearby Beaumont, a vacated city of 114,000 where the American oil industry was born, took on 3 feet of seawater. In Port Arthur, floodwaters were even deeper, streaming over highways and intersections.

“In a lot of residential areas, roads are impassable,” said Beaumont Police Chief David Travis. “There are just so many thousands of trees down. It’s hard to even describe, it’s so immense.”

Rita sideswiped Galveston, which had been left a ghost island by the evacuation of most of its 60,000 residents. The town suffered little flooding, but high winds whipped showers of embers from an apartment fire early Saturday, burning three downtown structures. A woman who suffered burns was airlifted to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, where she was listed in critical condition, said Mayor Pro Tem Joe Jaworksi.

President Bush, overseeing disaster preparations from the headquarters of the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., authorized 500 more active-duty troops to aid in the gulf. The governors of Louisiana and Texas initially asked for 25,000 new troops, a request that Defense officials said had been withdrawn.

“The first order of business now is the search-and-rescue teams, to pull people out of harm’s way,” Bush said. The president was expected to consult with officials today during stops in San Antonio and Baton Rouge, La.

Paulison -- who assumed control of FEMA when Michael D. Brown resigned after lethargic government response to Hurricane Katrina -- acknowledged that massive traffic jams during Houston’s evacuation were more evidence of official failings.

Paulison said he would require the overhaul of emergency plans.

Harris County’s top official, Robert Eckels, said Houston’s evacuation showed that millions could safely flee a metropolis. But in an interview, Eckels conceded that city’s plan did not factor in a panic-stricken postKatrina mind-set. Residents even in safe areas fled inland.

“Many people said, ‘I’m worried about the storm surge,’ ” Eckels said. “And they thought, ‘I don’t live in an evacuation zone, but I’m worried about electricity. It’s going to be horrible so we’re going to load up the car.’ Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who did not live in coastal evacuation zones chose to leave. This overloaded the system.”

Fearing more gridlock if evacuees tried to return all at once, Texas officials warned residents to stay away and said police would enforce curfews.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged those who evacuated Houston and other areas not to return until officials declared their communities safe.

“Be patient, stay put,” he said. “If you are in a safe place with food, water, bedding, you are better remaining there for the time being.”

Houston Mayor Bill White said his Police Department received 28 burglary calls overnight and made 16 arrests -- less than a typical Friday night. There had been a handful of looting arrests, White said. Scattered flooded towns reported similar incidents.

But White emphasized to residents that “your property is secure,” trying to convince them to stay away.

He said Houston officials planned a staggered reentry for as many as 2.7 million Texans who had scattered to Austin, Dallas and points north and west.

Starting today, residents will be allowed back in phased returns. Those in flooded areas are to be brought back early next week. Employers were asked to delay a return to work, and schools were closed for several days.

But Houston City Councilman Michael Berry said he was bracing for an overnight crush of evacuees returning from Dallas, Austin and College Station. “People have been sitting around all day trying to decide whether to come back,” he said. Berry guessed many had made up their minds.

In Galveston, Joey Bishop, 42, and Melanie Wray, 46, surveyed the damage at Schutte’s Corner, a cafe near the island’s hospital complex. Wray is a waitress at the cafe, which lost an awning and a couple of fences but was mostly unscathed.

Yearning to be home, they had returned to the barrier island city as the winds weakened. They got as far as a Wal-Mart parking lot, where they waited out the storm in their wind-rocked car.

Bishop felt glad to be spared but was already impatient with the pace of recovery. “They need to get the power back on,” he said.

In New Orleans, rain early Saturday strained the Katrina-damaged levee system, again flooding already ruined and abandoned neighborhoods.

The recovery of Katrina’s dead was suspended until Rita passed and the city was secure, officials said.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said rainwater as deep as 12 feet spilled over the canal into sunken sections of the city. On some streets in the Lower 9th Ward, floodwaters lapped over parked cars as pigeons huddled on rooftops and power lines. Water pooled up to 2 feet in some other sections, but most of the city remained dry, Nagin said.

Nagin said Army Corps of Engineers officials had assured him that the city’s other fragile dikes at 17th Street and London Avenue “seem to be holding up.” He said his plan to return businesspeople to the city had been set back “three or four days,” but Nagin remained confident the new flooding was only a minor inconvenience.

“We are still looking to start the reentry process,” he said.

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Tracking the damage

A weakened Hurricane Rita hit the Texas-Louisiana border early Saturday morning with sustained 120-mph winds. The Category 3 storm spared Texas widespread destruction, but “compounded Louisiana’s pain,” the state’s governor said.

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Texas

Houston: No major flooding; minimal power outages; some structural damage; trees and power lines down

Baytown: Power lines, poles and debris in the streets; fire shuts down water treatment plant

Galveston: Fire burns three buildings in the historic district; some structural damage from winds; no major flooding; dusk-to-dawn curfew in force

Lumberton: Scattered flooding; trees and power lines down

Beaumont: Widespread building damage; 10% of trees and power lines down; three feet of seawater

Port Arthur: Widespread wind damage and extensive flooding with depths of three to seven feet

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Louisiana

Lake Charles: Flooding with power lines and many trees down; 15% of the city’s streets blocked; windows blown out; small boats smashed; airport buildings damaged

Jefferson Davis Parish: Heavy damage to buildings from extensive flooding; some looting reported

Vermilion Parish: Heavy flooding; hundreds of people rescued by boat and helicopter; widespread power outages

Lafayette: Trees uprooted and widespread power outages in the city and parish

New Orleans: About 500 residents rescued from flooded homes; Industrial Canal levee still breached; Lower 9th Ward under water; no deaths reported

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Growing weaker, still wet

Rita, downgraded to a tropical depression, is slowly moving north. Additional rain is expected along Rita’s path, with amounts ranging from three inches to 15 inches in some spots. Tornadoes are possible to the east of Rita’s route through this morning.

Sources: The Associated Press, Reuters, Times reporting, National Weather Service, ESRI, TeleAtlas. Graphics reporting by Tom Reinken

Simmons reported from Abbeville, Gold from Carlyss and Braun from Washington. These Times staff writers also contributed: Paul Pringle from Lafitte, La., Nicole Gaouette from New Orleans, Mai Tran from Baton Rouge, Maria L. La Ganga from Galveston, Lianne Hart from Houston, P.J. Huffstutter from Beaumont, and J. Michael Kennedy from Los Angeles.