Hurricane Rita weakened further on Friday but United States forecasters said it would still be a dangerous, major storm when it hits land.
The US National Hurricane Centre said it now expects Rita to make landfall early on Saturday.
Maximum sustained winds have eased to about 215kph, putting Rita at the border of category three and four on the five-level Saffir Simpson scale. It was rated a category five early on Thursday.
The centre said ”slight weakening is possible before landfall, but Rita is expected to come ashore as a major hurricane”.
At 3pm GMT, the eye of the storm was reported to be about 335km south-east of Port Arthur in Texas.
The Miami-based hurricane centre predicted the storm will make landfall on the south-west Louisiana coast or in nearby Texas, early on Saturday.
Forecasters warned of flooding along the coast and tornadoes.
Massive evacuation
About one million people have left the area around Houston ahead of Rita, including about 15 000 who were helped out by authorities, city officials said on Friday.
”About a million people have left and 15 000 have been evacuated,” said the mayor’s spokesperson, Frank Michel.
”We did not have such a migration since the Civil War in the 19th century,” he said.
Many of those assisted were sent to other states, while others have been located in shelters believed to be safe in Houston, he said.
Michel said the city had received calls from 10 000 people who said they did not have the money to evacuate, asking for help.
The city of two million began contacting nursing homes earlier in the week.
”We did not want to have the same scenes as in New Orleans,” he said, referring to cases in New Orleans where Hurricane Katrina’s victims included elderly who died when they were unable to flee.
”We are not enouraging the general public to go on the streets looking for a shelter,” mayor Bill White said in a morning press conference. ”Now is not the time to begin evacuating. People should prepare to shelter in place.”
White said city buses and trucks with spare gasoline were heading up the freeways to help stranded motorists.
In Orange county, east of Beaumont, where some of the worst damage is expected, about 90% of residents have evacuated.
A bus carrying elderly evacuees from Hurricane Rita caught fire and was rocked by explosions early on Friday on a gridlocked highway near Dallas, killing as many as 24 people, authorities said.
”Deputies were unable to get everyone off the bus,” Dallas county sheriff’s department spokesperson Don Peritz said. He said he believes 24 people were killed, but that number could change.
The bus, with about 45 people on board, had been travelling since Thursday. Peritz declined to give details on who the passengers were, except to say they were from a nursing home in Bellaire, an upscale enclave within Houston.
Early indications were that it caught fire because of mechanical problems, and then passengers’ oxygen tanks started exploding, Peritz said. He said the brakes may have been on fire.
Another New Orleans flood
Meanwhile, New Orleans’s hard-hit ninth ward neighbourhood was flooded again on Friday as water whipped up by Hurricane Rita topped a levee, the US Army Corps of Engineers said.
”There has been an overtopping of the levee at the Industrial Canal,” said army corps spokesperson Mitch Frazier.
”We have a crew on site,” he said, stressing the structure itself has not failed.
”The water is flowing on the western side of the canal into the ninth ward,” the spokesperson said. — AFP
