Gas Supplies Short as Nearly 2 Million Flee Hurricane Rita

Hundreds of thousands of people across the Houston metropolitan area struggled to make their way inland in a vast, bumper-to-bumper exodus Thursday as Hurricane Rita closed in on the nation's fourth-largest city with winds howling at 150 mph.

Drivers ran out of gas in 14-hour traffic jams or looked in vain for a place to stay as hotels hundreds of miles in from the coast filled up. Others got tired of waiting in traffic and turned around and went home.

An estimated 1.8 million residents or more in Texas and Louisiana were under orders to evacuate to avoid a deadly repeat of Katrina.

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

The storm weakened Thursday morning from a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4 as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico, and forecasters said it could lose more steam by the time it comes ashore late Friday or early Saturday.

And in the afternoon, Rita made a sharper-than-expected turn to the right, and it appeared that Houston and nearby Galveston might escape a direct hit. Instead, it looked as if Rita might come ashore near Port Arthur, Texas, or Lake Charles, La., at least 60 miles up the coast.

But it could still be a dangerous storm - one aimed at a section of coastline with the nation's biggest concentration of oil refineries.

In New Orleans, meanwhile, Rita's outer bands brought the first measurable rain to the city since Katrina, raising fears that the patched-up levees could give way and cause a new round of flooding.

Highways leading inland out of Houston, a metropolitan area of 4 million people, were clogged up to 100 miles north of the city. Service stations reported running out of gasoline, and police officers carried gas to motorists who ran out. Texas authorities also asked the Pentagon for help in getting gasoline to drivers stuck in traffic, and sent gasoline tankers to take up positions along evacuation routes to help.

To speed the evacuation, Gov. Rick Perry halted all southbound traffic into Houston along Interstate 45 and took the unprecedented step of opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and nearby Galveston.

Trazanna Moreno tried to leave Houston for the 225-mile trip to Dallas on U.S. 90 but turned back after getting stuck in traffic.

"We ended up going six miles in two hours and 45 minutes," said Moreno, whose neighborhood is not expected to flood. "It could be that if we ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere that we'd be in a worse position in a car dealing with hurricane-force winds than we would in our house."

With traffic at a dead halt, fathers and sons got out of their cars and played catch on freeway medians. Others stood next to their cars, videotaping the scene, or walked between vehicles, chatting with people along the way. Tow trucks tried to wend their way along the shoulders, pulling stalled cars out of the way.

Hotels filled up all the way to the Oklahoma and Arkansas line.

John Decker, 47, decided to board up his home and hunker down because he could not find a hotel room.

"I've been calling since yesterday morning all the way up to about 1 this morning. No vacancies anywhere," he said. "I checked all the way from here to Del Rio to Eagle Pass. I called as far as Lufkin, San Marcos, San Angelo. The only place I didn't call was El Paso. By the time you reach El Paso, it's almost time to turn back."

At 2 p.m. EDT, Rita was centered about 435 miles southeast of Galveston and was moving at near 9 mph. It winds were near 150 mph, down from 175 mph earlier in the day. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore somewhere along a 400-mile stretch of the Texas and Louisiana coast that includes the Houston-Galveston area near the midpoint.

Forecasters warned of the possibility of a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet, battering waves, and rain of up to 15 inches along the Texas and western Louisiana coast. Three to five inches of rain were possible over New Orleans, where engineers raced to fortify the city's Katrina-damaged levees and pumps.

The U.S. mainland has not been hit by two Category 4 storms in the same year since 1915. Katrina came ashore Aug. 29 as a Category 4.

An estimated 1.3 million people in Galveston, the Corpus Christi area, Beaumont, low-lying parts of Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders. And about 500,000 in southwestern Louisiana were told to get out as well.

Oil refineries and chemical plants in and around Houston began shutting down, and hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs.

The Texas governor recalled Texas National Guardsmen and other emergency personnel and equipment from Louisiana to get ready for Rita.