The Rita Exodus

Traffic came to a standstill and gas shortages were reported Thursday as hundreds of thousands of people in the Houston metropolitan area rushed to get out of the path of Hurricane Rita, a monster storm with 170 mph winds.

They joined the more than 1.3 million residents in Texas and Louisiana fleeing in hopes of avoiding a deadly repeat of Katrina.

"If there was a Category 6, Rita would be there," said CBS News meteorologist George Cullen. "This is an incredible storm right now, the third most intense hurricane ever recorded."

The line of cars heading away from the Texas coastline said it all, reports CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan. Highways leading inland out of Houston were gridlocked, with bumper-to-bumper traffic for up to 100 miles north of the city. Gas stations were reported to be running out of gas. Shoppers emptied grocery store shelves of spaghetti, tuna and other nonperishable items.

Houston's Astrodome, which had been housing Katrina evacuees, is now empty, reports

"The lights are off, the gates are closed, all of the evacuees have been moved out, either to other parts of Texas — other parts of the country even, including places like Arkansas and Tennessee," Regan said.

Katrina evacuees told Regan that it was like "deja vu all over again," packing up to go to yet another area where they had never been before. "They said the real difference, this time around, is that they are going with their families. They are not fearful that they will be in jeopardy of being separated from their families."

To speed the evacuation out of the nation's fourth-largest city, Gov. Rick Perry halted all southbound traffic into Houston along Interstate 45 and took the unprecedented stop of opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston.

Police officers along the highways carried gasoline to help people get out of town.

Galveston is a city of about 58,000 people perched on a barrier island. It was here the deadliest hurricane on record slammed ashore in 1900, killing 8,000 people. Most of them drowned.

Rita could bring a storm surge as high as 20 feet, and as far inland as five miles. If it's even close to that, computer models project that — even with its 17-foot sea wall — most of Galveston could be under water again.

"The water is going to rise very, very rapidly. If you stay there, you don't have a chance," warned KHOU meteorologist Dr. Neil Frank, a former head of the National Hurricane Center.

"Not a good picture for us," City Manager Steve LeBlanc said.

Rita appeared to be aimed straight at a section of coastline with the nation's biggest concentration of oil refineries.

Forecasters said it could be the strongest hurricane on record to ever hit Texas. Only three Category 5 hurricanes, the highest on the scale, are known to have hit the U.S. mainland — most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.

This time, FEMA is leaving no stone unturned, no bus unchartered, to get ready for the next monster hurricane, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston.

Hundreds of buses were dispatched Wednesday to evacuate the poor and move out hospital and nursing home patients, and truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and rescue and medical teams were on standby in an effort to show the lessons learned in Katrina.

"We want to make sure that the things that are delivered are delivered in the right place at the right time," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

That didn't happen with Katrina.

"Every mayor, every government official had some frustrations with FEMA," said Mayor Ben Morris of Slidell, La., where only Wednesday FEMA opened a disaster center.

The frustrations reached as far away as the state of Maine, where officials received ice that was supposed to go to the Gulf Coast.

At 8 a.m. EDT Thursday, Rita was centered about 490 miles southeast of Galveston and about 595 miles east-southeast of Corpus Christi, and was moving west-northwest near 9 mph. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore along the central Texas coast between Galveston and Corpus Christi, and even if it weakens as expected, the Hurricane Center says it will be at least a Category 3 storm.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 70 miles from the center of the storm, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the fractured levees protecting New Orleans, where CBS News correspondent Jim Krasula (audio) reports residents are keeping a careful watch on Rita.

In the Galveston-Houston-Corpus Christi area, special attention was given to hospitals and nursing homes, three weeks after scores of sick and elderly patients in the New Orleans area drowned in Katrina's floodwaters or died in the stifling heat while waiting to be rescued.

In Houston, the state's largest city and home to the highest concentration of Katrina refugees, geography makes evacuation particularly tricky. While many hurricane-prone cities are right on the coast, Houston is 60 miles inland, so a coastal suburban area of 2 million people must evacuate through a metropolitan area of 4 million people where the freeways are often clogged under the best of circumstances.

Meanwhile, the death toll from Katrina passed the 1,000 mark Wednesday in five Gulf Coast states. The body count in Louisiana alone was put at nearly 800, most found in the receding floodwaters of New Orleans.

Crude oil prices rose again on fears that Rita would destroy key oil installations in Texas and the gulf. Hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs. Texas, the heart of U.S. crude production, accounts for 25 percent of the nation's total oil output.

Rita is the 17th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, making this the fourth-busiest season since record-keeping started in 1851. The record is 21 tropical storms in 1933. The hurricane season is not over until Nov. 30.