Rita assaults Gulf Coast
A mass killer long before its core drilled ashore, Hurricane Rita assaulted a vast swath of the Gulf Coast early Saturday. Its torrential rain, towering storm surge and destructive winds again inundated parts of New Orleans and threatened to swamp key oil refineries.
Rita's first victims -- 24 elderly or infirm evacuees -- died not from water, not from wind, but from fire. Flames killed them in what they thought was the safety of a bus carrying them away from a Houston suburb -- and from danger.
In terms of power this has already happened, but we expect the damage this hurricane will cause will be on a very large scale. Hurricane Rita will probably go into the record books as the strongest hurricane ever recorded.
Rita is much stronger than hurricane Katrina (category 4) which hit Louisiana just three weeks ago, causing the deaths of almost 1,000 people. The only other hurricanes of Rita's strength to hit the U.S. in the last 70 years was one in 1935, Hurricane Camille (1969) and Hurricane Andrew (1992).