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Rita's destruction falls short of fears
A line of shrimp boats steamed through an oil sheen to reach Hackberry, only to find homes and camps had been flattened. In one area, there was a flooded high school football field, its bleachers and goal posts jutting from what had become part of the Gulf of Mexico. "In Cameron, there's really hardly anything left. Everything is just obliterated," said Blanco, who has asked the federal government for $34 billion to aid in storm recovery. Added Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, head of the Louisiana National Guard: "This is terrible. Whole communities are gone." Some bayou residents who arrived with boats in hopes of getting back in to survey the damage to their property were turned away by state officials. But all it took was a scan of the Intracoastal waterway to see a hint of the damage: refrigerators and even a few coffins from the area's above-ground cemeteries bobbing in the water. After a briefing with Blanco in Baton Rouge, President Bush said: "I know the people of this state have been through a lot. We ask for God's blessings on them and their families." Just across the state line, Texas' Perry toured the badly hit refinery towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur area by air Sunday. "Look at that," he said, pointing to a private aircraft hangar with a roof that was half collapsed and half strewn across the surrounding field. "It looks like a blender just went over the top of it." He said the region has been secured by law enforcement, but does not have water and sewer services available. He urged residents to stay out for now, though the statewide picture was better. "Even though the people right here in Beaumont and Port Arthur and this part of Orange County really got whacked, the rest of the state missed a bullet," Perry said. In contrast to Katrina, with its death toll of more than 1,000, only two deaths had been attributed to Rita by Sunday — a person killed in north-central Mississippi when a tornado spawned by the hurricane overturned a mobile home and an east Texas man struck by a fallen tree. Two dozen evacuees were killed before the storm hit in a fatal bus fire near Dallas. In Houston, which along with coastal Galveston was spared the brunt of Rita, officials set up a voluntary, staggered plan for an "orderly migration" with different areas going home Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to avoid the massive gridlock that accompanied the exodus out. But while the return appeared to be going well Sunday with traffic moving briskly, not all Texans were happy with a slow return home. John Willy, the top elected official in Brazoria County, southwest of Houston, said he would ignore the state's staggered return plan. "I am not going to wait for our neighbors to the north to get home and take a nap, before I ask our good people to come home," he said in a statement. "Our people are tired of the state's plan! They have a plan too and it's real simple. They plan to come home when they want." Crude oil and gasoline futures traded lower Sunday, a response to news that damage to refineries was relatively light. The 255,000-barrel-per-day Valero Energy Corp. plant in Port Arthur appeared to be the most heavily damaged, facing at least two weeks of repairs from significant damage to two cooling towers and a flare stack. Still, a rapid recovery for refiners hinges on power being restored to parts of Texas and Louisiana where facilities are concentrated. The area's primary utility, Entergy Corp., said 271 high-voltage transmission lines were down and 275 substations out o service, and there was no immediate timeline of when power would be restored. Residents of Beaumont have been told it could be as long as a month. In New Orleans, the U.S. Corps of Engineers moved rocks and sandbags into the holes that broke open in the Industrial Canal levee as Rita closed in, flooding the already devastated Lower Ninth Ward. Workers believe that once the breaches are closed, the Ninth Ward can be pumped dry in a week, far more quickly than initially projected. With most of the city spared significant new damage from Rita, Mayor Ray Nagin immediately renewed his plan to allow some residents to return to drier parts of the city. Those areas — including the once-raucous French Quarter — could eventually support a population of at least half ot its pre-Katrina population of about 500,000 residents.
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