Hurricane downgraded to Category 3 as it bears down on Texas, La. coasts
HOUSTON - Hurricane Rita was downgraded to a Category 3 storm on Friday, after winds slowed to about 125 mph. Even so, the storm was roaring toward the Texas and Louisiana coast, creating monumental traffic jams along evacuation routes and raising fears of a catastrophic blow to residents and the nation’s oil-refining industry. As many as 24 people were killed when a bus carrying elderly evacuees caught fire.
Even though the winds had slowed, the storm surge was already taking a toll in areas previously hit by hurricane Katrina. In rainy New Orleans, water poured over a patched levee, gushing into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods — the hard-hit and largely empty Ninth Ward — and heightening fears that Rita would flood the devastated city all over again.
The storm, which was At centered about 190 miles southeast of Galveston, Tex., and about 175 miles southeast of Port Arthur, Tex., at 2 p.m. ET, was expected to come ashore early Saturday along the upper Texas-Louisiana coast. If it maintained that course , it might spare Houston and Galveston a direct hit, but plow straight into the Beaumont and Port Arthur area, a stretch of refineries and chemical plants about 75 miles east of Houston. [Read more - MSNBC]
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