Some Rita victims in Texas blocked from homes

updated 2:47 p.m. ET Sept. 27, 2005

BEAUMONT, Texas - Residents of the Texas refinery towns hit hardest by Hurricane Rita were blocked from returning to their homes Tuesday because of the danger of debris-choked streets, toppled power lines and a shortage of ice and generators.

President Bush attended a briefing Tuesday by Texas officials in this port city to assess damage, including refineries knocked out of power by the storm. Bush then took an aerial tour of the Texas-Louisiana area where Rita came ashore last weekend.

In the devastated small towns of Jasper, Port Arthur and Orange, temperatures climbed well into the 90s again Tuesday. Local authorities begged federal and state governments for help.

“East Texas needs everyone’s attention this hour, right now, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the state or FEMA or the Corps of Engineers. I don’t really care whose fault it is. It needs help now,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas. “These communities are the last to complain, but they’ve reached the end.”

Getting back in through the bayous
The number of deaths rose to nine Monday when the bodies of five people were discovered in a Beaumont apartment. A man, his girlfriend’s three children and their aunt apparently were overcome by carbon monoxide from a generator they used to power fans to cool their home.

While residents of the Texas refinery towns of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange were blocked from returning home, authorities in Louisiana were unable to keep bayou residents from venturing in by boat to see if Rita wrecked their homes.

Debris was strewn for miles over Cameron Parish, a coastal, sparsely populated town next to the Texas line. Seawater pushed as far as 20 miles inland, drowning acres of rice, sugarcane fields and pasture.

“This is the most damaged area I’ve seen in the state, the worst,” Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said of Cameron Parish. “I didn’t see anything from Katrina, except in Mississippi, that was as bad.”

At a makeshift emergency operations center at a national wildlife refuge, Randy Gary answered a stream of questions from residents trying to find out about their homes or camps. As for his house, he hadn’t been able to get to the town of Cameron, but he got an assessment. “There’s nothing but a clear lot,” he said.

Upbeat in the face of disaster
His oyster boats and pontoon boats also had disappeared, a further slap from Rita to his livelihood as a fisherman. The oyster beds he fishes likely are devastated, even if he had the boats to get to them.

But he was still smiling Monday.

“What else we gonna do?” he said, pledging to rebuild his shattered home and work. “It’s my life. It’s what I do.”

An estimated 80 percent of the buildings in Cameron, population 1,900, were leveled. Farther inland, half of Creole, population 1,500, was left in splinters.

If the power knocked out by the storm and oppressive heat weren’t enough, it was the ravenous mosquitoes invading their storm-damaged home north of Vidor, Texas, that convinced Harry Smith, his wife and two teenage boys to get out.

With their car disabled by a transmission problem, they hitchhiked more than 10 miles to a staging area for teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in hopes of finding shelter. Authorities put them on a bus to San Antonio with a few dozen other storm victims.

“It can’t be any worse than here,” said Smith, 49, a pipefitter, relieved to be going somewhere to get out of the heat and away from the insects. “This is the worst storm I’ve seen in the 46 years I’ve lived here.”

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