LONG convoys of ambulances, police cars and military vehicles sped in a blaze of flashing lights into hurricane-ravaged parts of Texas and Louisiana at the weekend as authorities raced to avoid a repeat of the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina.

In contrast to Katrina’s 1,000-plus toll, the only confirmed death from Hurricane Rita was a person killed when a tornado overturned a mobile home in the Mississippi town of Belzoni.

But 23 nursing home evacuees died in a bus crash before the storm began and rescue crews were still searching flooded areas of Vermilion Parish, west of New Orleans, where hundreds of people were feared stranded.

Although Rita’s eventual course spared big cities and oil installations from catastrophe, Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, said that he saw plenty of damage during a helicopter tour over Beaumont and Port Arthur. But he added: “There’s none of that just-down-to-the-foundation devastation that we saw [after Katrina].”

The Ford Park sporting complex outside Beaumont was transformed into a staging area and medical triage centre with 80 ambulances and dozens of National Guard humvees ferrying relief supplies in one direction and evacuating patients in the other.

“We were actually prepared to go to New Orleans for Katrina and the Government contacted us again when this happened,” said Tim Kaiser, a paramedic who brought his ambulance from Christianburg, Virginia. “We drove 20 hours to get down here and within one hour we were picking up patients.”

Search and rescue teams working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in a convoy carrying water, ready-to-eat meals, medical supplies and fuel.

The gambling resort, where a stretch of Interstate 10 over the Calcasieu River was closed because barges broke loose and slammed into the highway bridge, was expecting help from police officers from as far awat as California as outside assistance arrived in the disaster zone.

“The pre-positioning of assets on the right side of the storm to be able to move in as quickly as possible is what helped us here,” said Thad Allen, a Coast Guard Admiral who is in charge of the federal response to Rita in Louisiana.

Even before the hurricane made landfall, the military deployed 50,000 troops to support relief operations — almost double the number that eventually responded to Katrina.

President Bush, hoping to counter criticism over Katrina, projected a take-charge image at the weekend as he hopscotched from one disaster command centre to another. At Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, he said he would study a proposal for the Pentagon to take charge in big disasters.

The hurricane caused new flooding in New Orleans, inundated by Katrina four weeks ago. But the US Army Corps of Engineers said the alreadydevastated Ninth Ward could be pumped dry again within a week after a levee on the city’s Industrial Canal was repaired.

Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, said that he would press ahead with plans to allow residents back to drier parts of the city, such as the Algiers section, as early as today.

By veering east towards the Texas/Louisiana border, Hurricane Rita spared Houston and the “refinery row” along the Texas coast to Galveston. But the refinery town of Port Arthur was flooded and at least one petrol producer reported damage to two cooling towers and a flare stack at its 255,000-barrel-per-day installation there, which it will take two weeks to repair.

The oil price fell by more than $1 (56p) a barrel yesterday. The price of London Brent crude, which traded yesterday in a special weekend session, fell by $1.04 to $61.40 a barrel, as the world’s 26 most industrialised nationals said that they were considering releasing more emergency oil stocks to curb rising prices.

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