2 million Americans flee Hurricane Rita
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-23 13:51

Adding to problems was a shortage of security screeners, many of whom did not show up for work because they live in areas under mandatory evacuations. Airport officials flew in screeners from other Texas cities.

In Galveston, a city rebuilt after an unnamed 1900 hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 residents in what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the once-bustling tourist island was all but abandoned, with at least 90 percent off its 58,000 residents cleared out.

The city pinned its hopes on its 11-mile-long, 17-foot-high granite seawall to protect it from the storm surge, and a skeleton crew of police and firefighters to ward off potential looters.

"Whatever happens is going to happen and we are going to have a monumental task ahead of us once the storm passes," said City Manager Steve LeBlanc. "Galveston is going to suffer and we are going to need to get it back in order as soon as possible."

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.

At Houston's Johnson Space Center, NASA evacuated its staff, powered down the computers at Mission Control and turned the international space station over to the Russian space agency.

Along the coast, petrochemical plants began shutting down and hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs. Environmentalists warned of a worst-case scenario in which a storm surge pushed spilled oil or chemicals from the bayous into the city of Houston itself, inundating mostly poor, Hispanic neighborhoods on its south side.

Gov. Perry said state officials had been in contact with plants that are "taking appropriate procedures to safeguard their facilities."

In New Orleans, Rita's steady rains Thursday were the first measurable precipitation since Katrina. The forecast was for 3 to 5 inches in the coming days — dangerously close to the amount engineers said could send floodwaters pouring back into neighborhoods that have been dry for less than a week.

"Right now, it's a wait-and-see and hope-for-the-best," said Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which added sandbags to shore up levees and installed 60-foot sections of metal across some of the city's canals to protect against storm surges.