Rita Upgraded to 'Monster' Category 4 Hurricane

This is from the Washington Post:

KEY WEST, Fla., Sept. 21 -- Hurricane Rita quickly intensified into a monster Category 4 storm Wednesday, churning in the Gulf of Mexico with winds of up to 140 mph toward the Texas coast after slapping at the Florida Keys.

The National Hurricane Center warned Rita could intensify into a Category 5 hurricane in the next 24 hours as it travels over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Rita is an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane," the Hurricane Center in Miami said in a 10 a.m. EDT advisory.

Mandatory evacuations were underway in coastal Galveston, Tex., and flood-ravaged New Orleans. Although the hurricane was veering away from New Orleans, it still forced the evacuation of 7,000 of Louisiana's Katrina evacuees from Texas. And officials in New Orleans warned that as little as three inches of rain could swamp the city's damaged levees, according to the Associated Press.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff urged residents to quickly leave.

"The lesson is that when the storm hits, the best place to be is to be out of the path of the storm," he told ABC's "Good Morning America." "There's plenty of [advance] notice about Rita."

Gov. Rick Perry (R) of Texas said the first impact from the storm will probably be felt in Texas Thursday morning.

"If you're not out by then, you have problems," Perry said on CNN.

Rita's power grew quickly overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday. At 8 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center upgraded it from a Category 3 to a Category 4. The upgrade came only six hours after it was upgraded from a Category 2 to a Category 3 hurricane.

Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it slammed into the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, causing devastating damage along the Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama coastlines.

And we thought that Katrina was bad? Now we've got Rita coming into the Gulf Coast region. If it hits the Galveston / Houston region by Thursday, we'll probably see a lot more property damage and flooding in the region, but not the heavy loss of life as was with Katrina. In other words, the entire southern coast of the United States would be destroyed by these two monsters. What is even worst is that the oil infrastructure in Texas will also be damaged by Rita. With the oil and gas infrastructure in Louisiana already damaged by Katrina, we could start seeing energy supplies being contstricted even tighter, with heating oil and gas prices continuing to rise. Rita's own destruction in Texas could also add another $100 billion to the reconstruction bill (If Katrina's reconstruction bill costs $200 billion, then I'm estimating Rita's bill to be half that of Katrinas). Rita's going to force the lawmakers in Washington to question how they are going to pay for both Rita's and Katrina's bill on top of an already spiraling out-of-control budged deficit, a war in Iraq, and President Bush's insistence of keeping the tax cuts in place.