BEAUMONT, Sept 24: Hurricane Rita slammed into evacuated towns and oil refineries in the swamplands of the Texas-Louisiana border on Saturday, stripping roofs off buildings, cutting power to more than a million homes and flooding New Orleans once again.

Rita spared Houston, the fourth-largest US city, a direct hit. But oil city Beaumont, Texas, gambling-and-chemicals centre Lake Charles, Louisiana, and many of the largest U.S. refiners came into the storm’s path. Some refiners were hopeful they would find little damage from Rita.

The storm crashed into the U.S. Gulf Coast with 193kph winds and punishing rains, then weakened from Category 3 to Category 1, with 122kph winds as it moved inland.

However, it threatened to stall over Texas and could dump up to 60 centimetres of rain over the coming days, raising the prospect of more flooding.

Authorities urged the more than two million people who fled Rita not to return home yet.

“People are so scared that there are still some hiding in their closets,” said Jacelyne Patrick, 22, of Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town better known as the hometown of the late rock singer Janis Joplin. Patrick said a street sign flew into her house and the sky turned an eerie blue-green to greet Rita.

President George Bush, monitoring federal storm preparations from a military base in Colorado, said: “The situation is still dangerous because of potential flooding.”

Several neighbourhoods in New Orleans were flooded again, less than a month after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,000 people in Louisiana and Mississippi, as water poured over the low-lying city’s protective levees.

FANNING FIRES: High winds had uprooted stately oak trees, torn apart some buildings and fanned numerous fires across the region, officials said.—Reuters