Galveston in Peril as Rita Roars West
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

GALVESTON, Texas – Gaining strength with frightening speed, Hurricane Rita swirled toward the Gulf Coast as a Category 5, 165-mph monster yesterday, and more than 1.3 million people in Texas and Louisiana were sent packing on orders from authorities who learned a bitter lesson from Katrina.
“It’s scary. It’s really scary,” Shalonda Dunn said as she and her 5- and 9-year-old daughters waited to board a bus arranged by emergency authorities in Galveston. “I’m glad we’ve got the opportunity to leave. … You never know what can happen.”
With Rita projected to hit Texas by Saturday, the governor, Rick Perry, urged residents along the state’s entire coast to begin evacuating. And New Orleans braced for the possibility that the storm could swamp the misery-stricken city all over again.
Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys and began drawing energy with terrifying efficiency from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 2 a.m. and 4 p.m., it went from a 115-mph Category 2 to a 165-mph Category 5 storm.
Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the American mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the American mainland – most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.
Government officials eager to show they had learned their lessons from the sluggish response to Katrina sent in hundreds of buses to evacuate the poor, moved out hospital and nursing home patients, dispatched truckloads of water, ice, and ready-made meals, and put rescue and medical teams on standby. An Army general in Texas was told to be ready to assume control of a military task force in Rita’s wake.
“We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we got to be ready for the worst,” President Bush said in Washington.
By late afternoon, Rita was centered more than 700 miles southeast of Corpus Christi. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi.
But with its breathtaking size – tropical storm-force winds extending 350 miles across – practically the entire western end of the American Gulf Coast was in peril, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the fractured levees protecting New Orleans.
In the Galveston-Houston-Corpus Christi area, about 1.3 million people were under orders to get out, in addition to 20,000 or more along the Louisiana coast. Special attention was given to hospitals and nursing homes, three weeks after scores of sick and elderly patients in the New Orleans area drowned in Katrina’s floodwaters or died in the stifling heat while waiting to be rescued.
Military personnel in South Texas started moving north, too. Schools, businesses, and universities were also shut down.
Helicopters, ambulances, and buses were used to evacuate 200 patients from Galveston’s only hospital. And at the Edgewater Retirement Community, a six-story building near the city’s seawall, 200 elderly residents were not given a choice.
“They either go with a family member or they go with us, but this building is not safe sitting on the seawall with a major hurricane coming,” executive director David Hastings said. “I have had several say, ‘I don’t want to go,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going.'”
Galveston, a city of 58,000 on a coastal island 8 feet above sea level, was the site of one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history: an unnamed hurricane in 1900 that killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people and practically wiped the city off the map.
The last major hurricane to strike the Houston area was Category-3 Alicia in 1983. It flooded downtown Houston, spawned 22 tornadoes and left 21 people dead.
In Houston, the state’s largest city and home to the highest concentration of Katrina refugees, the area’s geography makes evacuation particularly tricky. While many hurricane-prone cities are right on the coast, Houston is 60 miles inland, so a coastal suburban area of 2 million people must evacuate through a metropolitan area of 4 million people where the freeways are often clogged under the best of circumstances.
Mayor Bill White urged residents to look out for more than themselves.
“There will not be enough government vehicles to go and evacuate everybody in every area,” he said. “We need neighbor caring for neighbor.”
At the Galveston Community Center, where 1,500 evacuees had been put on school buses to points inland, another lesson from Katrina was put into practice: To overcome the reluctance of people to evacuate without their pets, they were allowed to bring them along in crates.