Rita rattles the Gulf coast by Philip Avery
Hurricane Rita made landfall on the US gulf coast during the early hours of Saturday morning. Despite losing some energy in the hours leading up to landfall, the storm, packed with torrential rain and strong winds, still caused widespread damage. However, the damage could have been a lot more severe.
During the latter half of last week it was feared that the hurricane would hit the US coastline at full strength, and she did indeed briefly strengthen to a category 5 hurricane on Thursday (the highest category on a scale of 1-5). At her peak, Rita’s wind speeds reached 175mph and was heading straight for Galveston, Texas.
However the storm changed track slightly, and thankfully started to lose power as it drew ever closer to the coastline. On Friday, Rita was downgraded to a category 3 hurricane and just a few hours before making landfall, the storm was again downgraded to category 2.
Hurricane categories are a measure of the mean wind speed. So Rita was downgraded when her winds started to weaken - a lucky escape many would say. However the categories do not take into consideration the amount of rainfall which the storms bring. Therefore, despite her degradation, Rita still produced torrential rain causing widespread flooding, and the winds were still strong enough to damage building, electricity lines and knock down trees.
The worst hit by the storm was Port Arthur in Texas, but effects were felt over a vast amount of land. New Orleans, despite not being in the direct line of the storm, received very heavy rain and huge storm surges which caused more damage to levees and again flooded local areas. In fact Laplace, just west of New Orleans recorded 315mm (12.4 inches) of rainfall in one day.
Rita is now a tropical depression with winds of just 20mph, and is heading into Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee. As she heads further north and reaches cooler air, she is unable to hold the moisture which was picked up from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and so releases this in the form of rain. Therefore, heavy rainfall is still expected in these states over the coming few days.
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