Bracing for Rita
UPDATE III — Can you believe the size of this thing? (Easy, fellas. This link is hurricane related.)
UPDATE II —
So you can see from this illustration the course change I refer to in the update below. Over the last 24 hours it had been looking as if Rita would strike around Matagorda Island (also shown). The latest projected landfall doesn’t put Rita “dead on” for Galveston, as I indicated earlier after watching CNN’s report. But as you can plainly see, it puts her much closer to Galveston than she had been before.
UPDATE — Good grief. I’ve been hoping since yesterday that Rita would shift direction and spare Houston. Well, she has shifted, according to CNN anyway. But the shift is ever so slightly to the north, which has it looking as if the eye of the storm is now dead on for Galveston. Of course, we’re still two days out from landfall and further course change is possible. So I can still hope, and I do. But right now, it doesn’t look good for us. It just doesn’t. What else is there to say?
Associated Press (via KHOU-TV):
GALVESTON — Gaining strength with frightening speed, Hurricane Rita swirled toward the Gulf Coast a Category 5, 165-mph monster Wednesday as 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, Gov. 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.
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 U.S. mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the U.S. mainland - most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.
John Little at Blogs of War, who lives very near me (we’re both just outside of downtown Houston), has comprehensive coverage.