04:54 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Associated Press

KHOU-TV

Retirement home residents wait to be loaded on an evacuation bus this morning.

As residents in Galveston and parts of Houston began evacuating ahead of Hurricane Rita Wednesday, Governor Rick Perry urged inhabitants of the Texas coast from Beaumont-Port Arthur to Corpus Christi to move inland as Hurricane Rita approaches.

Perry warned that a full evacuation of the coast would take at least 33 hours, and he warned coastal residents not to wait for a mandatory evacuation order.

He says Rita would "quite likely be a devastating storm" as the Category Four storm approaches the coast with winds of up to 140 miles per hour. He urged coastal residents to calmly gather important documents, secure their homes, fuel their vehicles and move inland.

In Galveston, hospital and nursing home patients were evacuated and others gathered up belongings and began clearing out Wednesday as Rita intensified into a Category 4 storm with 140-mph winds and threatened the Texas coast.

Houston Mayor Bill White ordered evacuations in storm-surge areas in Houston and asked people in flood plains and mobile homes to voluntarily evacuate. He also asked employers to use only essential personnel and schools to shut down Thursday and Friday, and urged residents to help each other.

"We need citizens who may need assistance in evacuations to reach out to friends, family and neighbors," he said. "There will not be enough government vehicles to go and evacuate everybody in every area."

The Houston area's geography makes evacuation particularly tricky. Unlike other hurricane-prone cities where the big city is on the coast, Houston is 60 miles inland. So a coastal suburban area of 2 million people has to evacuate through a metropolitan area of nearly 4 million.

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, the city's only hospital, had discharged about 200 people healthy enough to go home and were evacuating others by helicopter, ambulance and buses.

"When the storm happens, we are shutting everything down and we are not taking anybody in," said hospital spokeswoman Jennifer Reynolds-Sanchez.

Buses bound for shelters in Huntsville and College Station were to leave Galveston County, which has about 267,000 residents. The city ordered mandatory evacuations to begin later in the day. On Wednesday morning, dozens of people lined up, carrying pillows, bags and coolers to board one of several yellow Galveston school district buses.

Some 600 public housing residents were among those to be bused, and city officials reassured residents no one would be left behind.

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"We've got more bus space than people and I'm not going to send them off empty," said City Manager Steve LeBlanc. "We are going to hold empty buses until the bitter end."

Sharon Strain, head of the Galveston Housing Authority, said anyone who can't make it to the buses would be picked up.

"After this killer in New Orleans, Katrina, I just cannot fathom staying," 59-year-old Ldyyan Jean Jocque said before sunrise Wednesday as she waited for an evacuation bus outside the Galveston Community Center. She had packed her Bible, some music and clothes into plastic bags and loaded her dog into a pet carrier.

North of Galveston in Harris County, which includes Houston, the state's largest city, officials urged residents to prepare for flooding as much as 35 miles inland.

Authorities said they wanted to make sure Texans learned from watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi on Aug. 29. Hundreds of thousands of people stayed through the storm, leaving many without food or water for days.

"We've always asked people to leave earlier, but because of Katrina, they are now listening to us and they're leaving as we say," Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas said.

The Edgewater Retirement Community, a six-story building situated near the city's seawall, began evacuating its more than 200 nursing home patients and independent retirees by chartered bus and ambulance.

"They either go with a family member or they go with us, but this building is not safe sitting on the seawall with a major hurricane coming," said David Hastings, executive director. "I have had several say, `I don't want to go,' and I said, `I'm sorry, you're going."'

Other Texans who had ridden out major hurricanes along the Gulf Coast also boarded up windows, packed their valuables and started driving inland.

"We just want to go way out there, to be sure we are far enough away," said 61-year-old Christina Ybarrashe, a lifelong Galveston resident, as she boarded up their family home with plywood Tuesday.

Thomas said Galveston County officials used a law passed this year to order a mandatory evacuation of its coastal communities beginning Wednesday night. But authorities said they would not forcibly remove anyone from their homes.

Other parts of Texas also prepared for Rita.

Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday declared the state a disaster area and spoke with President Bush to request approval of federal aid to affected counties. Perry was expected to make an evacuation announcement later Wednesday.

The State Emergency Operations Center also went on 24-hour status, with 34 state agencies on site, Walt said.

The state Division of Emergency Management started moving food, water and other supplies to Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio in preparation for evacuees or to use in case of power outages in those areas.

After witnessing Katrina, Houston emergency managers modified traffic management plans and made the elderly and those with special needs a priority for evacuations.