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Rita's aftermath more than a tale of two states

The path back from Hurricane Rita — for some, just an unobstructed breeze down a Texas highway, for others a soggy boat ride followed by rebuilding life from the ground up — began in earnest Sunday.

In broadest terms, the wake of Rita — by late Sunday downgraded to a weak tropical storm and dumping rain across a large area centered near Memphis — could be seen as a tale of two states: Texas, the state it mostly missed, and Louisiana, the state that got an unexpectedly rude and damaging visit.

But the ground-level view was more nuanced.

Low-lying coastal areas of Louisiana from south of Lafayette to the Texas line essentially had become part of the Gulf of Mexico, with tiny communities such as Holly Beach and Hackberry in Cameron Parish swept away.

An armada of about 100 boats set out from Abbeville, La., in Vermilion Parish, in search of people who might have attempted to ride out the storm.

Farther north, in Lake Charles, there was extensive damage and no power, but Saturday's flooding from the lake had quickly receded.

Southeast Texas, though spared loss of life or even many injuries, still had extensive tree and structural damage and hundreds of thousands of people without electricity, water or sewer services as Sunday ebbed, a situation that could persist for days or even weeks.

A weakened dam at Lake Livingston Reservoir, though expected to hold, was causing downstream flooding and detours from a closed bridge on U.S. 59 after officials began releasing water to ease the load on the dam.

But in Harris County and points south, Rita cuffed the area so lightly that politician John Willy, the top elected official in Brazoria County, took umbrage over any restraint on an instant return to normalcy.

"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, protesting a state return plan that would have kept evacuees away from home another day. "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."

And in Central Texas, where the only wave from Rita was about 17,300 evacuees staying in 49 shelters (and an untold number staying with family or friends), the tide quickly receded coastward once Rita passed Saturday morning. By late Sunday afternoon, the evacuee count at Austin-area shelters was at 3,900 and falling.

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. Twenty-three evacuees were killed in a bus fire near Dallas before the storm hit.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, after a morning helicopter ride over the hardest-hit areas in Beaumont and Port Arthur, summed it up this way: "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."

Services come slowly

Everything from heart attacks to births was keeping emergency workers in Beaumont and in Orange scrambling Sunday as the cities started restoring services.

Beaumont officials brought in large generators for hospitals, police and fire stations and other critical services. Water and sewer service to other cities and towns in Jefferson County is expected to be back in the next several days, but electrical service could take longer, officials said.

The Salvation Army established canteens throughout the county to distribute water and other supplies to residents who did not evacuate before the storm and still wished to stay. But the group initially is concentrating its efforts on emergency personnel.

Hundreds of people who rode out the storm were brought on buses and ambulances to Ford Park, a large sports facility just west of downtown Beaumont on Interstate 10. Officials said the evacuees would be taken to a shelter at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Brown Claybar, the mayor of Orange, showed up at the Jefferson County Office of Emergency Management to ask for supplies. Claybar said the police and emergency dispatching system had failed, which prompted city officials to go inside a Radio Shack where the windows were blown out to take walkie-talkies.

In Port Arthur, many homes were damaged or destroyed by high winds and water, but most residents had evacuated.

At least one of the city's refineries, a 255,000-barrel-per-day plant belonging to Valero Energy Corp., was heavily damaged. Repairs could delay opening at least two weeks, officials said, and the lack of electricity could cause further delay. Sixteen refineries in Texas, some of them likely with little or no damage farther to the west, remained shut down Sunday.

Even so, crude oil futures fell in unusual Sunday trading as it appeared that oil rig and refinery damage from the storm was less than feared. A barrel of light crude for November delivery was quoted at $62.80 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down $1.40.

Southeast Texas' primary utility, Entergy Corp., on Sunday asked customers in its western service area north of Houston to conserve energy after Hurricane Rita caused extensive damage to power lines and transmission towers.

Estimates of those still in the dark Sunday varied widely from as few as 300,000 to 1.1 million in Texas and Louisiana.

Justin DeMello, a FEMA representative stationed in Beaumont, said his agency is working to obtain thousands of Meals Ready to Eat and other supplies and take them to Reliant Stadium in Houston for distribution by Texas National Guard officials.

McNeel, a district chief for the Beaumont Fire Department, said that an estimated 4 million cubic yards of debris covers the city and that workers have begun to clear the streets. City officials are developing a plan to burn downed trees.

Danger at dam

So far, it appears that the massive traffic tie-ups created last week by the exodus from the Gulf Coast are not being repeated as residents return. A greater concern, it appears now, might be damage to the dam holding back one of the largest bodies of water in Texas.

Carlos Lopez, director of traffic operations for the Texas Department of Transportation, saw no problems in a Sunday flyover aside from backups near a closed bridge on U.S. 59 near Lake Livingston.

"It looked like a typical Sunday at noon," Lopez said.

That bridge was closed at 1 a.m. Sunday after releases from a dam on the Trinity River forced a barge against the supports of the southbound bridge.

The condition of that 2.5-mile dam holding in Lake Livingston Reservoir, about five miles upriver from U.S. 59, makes driving on the highway a risk.

Spencer Karr, the emergency management coordinator for the Trinity River Authority, said the dam had been seriously damaged by Hurricane Rita. To keep the dam from failing, the authority was releasing 80,000 cubic feet per second from the lake, causing moderate to severe flooding downstream, Karr said.

"The alternative in this scenario, obviously, would be the potential of dam failure," Karr said.

The authority hopes to lower the surface of the 130-square-mile lake by 5 feet, a process expected to last until midday Tuesday.

The 55-foot-high dam is about 310 feet wide and is made of two layers of clay. On the reservoir side, the berm is covered by large limestone boulders called rip-rap. Rita caused much of that rip-rap to slide off the dam and into the reservoir, which in turn allowed severe erosion of the outer layer of clay.

A catastrophic failure of the dam, aside from threatening U.S. 59, would put downstream communities at risk all the way to Trinity Bay near Anahuac. Karr said all of those communities — Goodrich, Romayor, Liberty — have been evacuated, many of them before the hurricane.

Paradise lost

Along the central Louisiana coast where Rita's heavy rains and storm-surge flooding pushed water up to 9 feet high in homes, more than 100 boats gassed up at an Abbeville car dealership Sunday before venturing out on search-and-rescue missions to find hundreds of residents believed to have tried to ride out Rita.

About 500 people were rescued from high waters along the coast in the immediate aftermath of the storm and emergency calls were still coming in from far-flung areas near the Gulf of Mexico.

"The flooding is still extensive," said Michael Bertrand of the Vermilion Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness, adding that water was creeping into areas that were spared flooding Saturday. "We'll be going back through there to see if there's anybody left."

In Cameron Parish, just across the state line from Texas and in the path of Rita's harshest winds east of the eye, fishing communities were reduced to splinters, with concrete slabs the only evidence that homes once stood there. Debris was strewn for miles by water or wind.

Holly Beach, a vacation and fishing spot, was gone. Only the stilts that held houses off the ground remained.

A line of shrimp boats steamed through an oil sheen to reach Hackberry only to find homes and camps had been flattened.

"This is terrible. Whole communities are gone," said Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, head of the Louisiana National Guard.

Some bayou residents arrived with boats in hopes of getting back in to survey the damage to their property, but authorities weren't letting anyone in.

"I've been through quite a few of them, and we've never had water like this," said L.E. Nix, who lives on the edge of a bayou in southern Calcasieu Parish. "I had a little piece of paradise, and now I guess it's gone."

Ben Wear and Tony Plohetski write for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: bwearstatesman.com; tplohetski@statesman.com. Staff writers Mike Ward, Andrea Ball, Raven Hill and Bob Banta and the Associated Press contributed to this report.