Rita - First Impacts

Poor New Orleans. It has become the first Gulf Coast victim of Rita after the battering it got from Katrina.

"Our worst fears came true," said Maj. Barry Guidry, a Georgia National Guardsman on duty at the broken levee. "We have three significant breaches in the levee and the water is rising rapidly."

There was no indication that the bulk of New Orleans was in danger from the new flooding. But the largely abandoned Ninth Ward was swamped by a torrent of water pouring over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee. The water gushed through gaps at least 100 feet wide and was waist-deep on a nearby street.

And watch for a big argument after the clean-up. The Army Corps of Engineers says the original flooding in New Orleans was caused by failure of the levees after storm surge waters overtopped them. Some expert disagree though.

Hurricane researchers at Louisiana State University disagreed, saying the walls collapsed because of a structural failure, not because floodwater from Lake Pontchartrain flowed over the top.

"There was a catastrophic structural failure of those levees," said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. "Basically, they were not up to the task."

Faulty engineering or poor construction or a combination of the two could have caused the breaches, Heerden said.

If that claim is borne out, expect heads on pikes.

Meanwhile, 500,000 Louisianans are now on the roads, adding to the mass diaspora from the Texas coast. State police said flooding in coastal Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes had forced street closures by midday. Rising winds shook light buildings as far away as Baton Rouge and tornado warnings were in effect for parts of Louisiana.

Hurricane Rita has been downgraded to a Cat. Three hurricane, but that is still strong enough to cause widespread destruction as it comes ashore.

In Texas, the storm would cause a "catastrophic flood" likely to inundate the city of Port Arthur under an 18- to 22-foot (6- to 7- meter) storm surge, said Jack Colley, the director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. It would affect 5.2 million Texans, destroy 6,000 homes and have an initial economic impact of $8.2 billion, he said.

He predicted 16 hours of hurricane-force winds where the storm hits, as well as an onslaught of medium-sized tornadoes.

Yet so far, the biggest story is the failure of Houston's evacuation plan.

As authorities struggled to complete one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history in the final hours before Rita's landfall, the problems underscored that despite years of planning for a major emergency after September 11, 2001, attacks, a fast evacuation of a large urban area cannot be ensured.

More than 2 million people were leaving the Gulf coastal areas and Houston, the fourth-largest U.S. city with a metropolitan population of 4 million, was deserted, with stores closed, roads emptied and few people on the streets.

People trying to escape Houston crowded inland-bound highways and sat for hours in enormous traffic jams on Thursday and struggled to find gasoline. Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc. said its stations in the area had run out of fuel.

People who had not left by midday Friday were advised to stay in their homes.

"Those people at risk should not get on the highways to evacuate. People should prepare to shelter in place if they have not evacuated." Houston Mayor Bill White said.

It looks like a fair number of people may end up riding out the storm stuck in their vehicles on Interstates that flood frequently in far lesser storms. The scenario brewing is of freeways chopped into small islands, with hampered access for emergency responders. Motorists will be trapped, running out of gas and without access to supplies of food and water. Flashfloods and winds will undoubtably be dangerous and some may be washed or blown away.

The massive exodus of people overwhelmed the highway system, leaving expressways jammed like parking lots and the Mayor said on radio that the clogged roads could be a death trap in a storm.

Motorists stuck in the jams were relieved to be told that the National Guard would be arriving with petrol supplies but when they came to begin emergency fuel distribution, it turned out that the nozzles on the tankers were too large for civilian automobiles.

FEMA's central hub of supplies is in San Antonio, where Bush is today on a photo-op tour before heading to Northcom in Colorado. One could wonder why he isn't in the White House doing his job from its excellently appointed control rooms. Maybe he is worried about his Crawford ranch, 200 miles Northwest of Houston, washing away. Its a distinct possibility.

That aside, FEMA is going to have great difficulties getting those supplies anywhere along flashflooded roads. Dallas and Austin areas are now beginning to issue their own weather advisories in full and certain knowledge that 2 feet of rain in Flash Flood Alley is a disaster of epic proportions even when the roads are not gridlocked. FEMA hopes to move more supplies into the Fort Worth area on Sunday - best of luck with that. Some, maybe even most, of those trucks are going to end up on those gridlocked flood-created islands.