Hurricane Rita hit Texas and Louisiana early Saturday morning as a category three hurricane, flooding land and destroying homes and businesses along the Gulf coast.
The storm was originally projected to hit Galveston and Houston, but spared the cities and oil refineries major damage, major news organizations said.
While traveling through the Gulf Coast, Rita became the third most powerful hurricane on record in the Atlantic, reaching category five strength with winds at 175 mph.
Category five strength was only maintained for a short time before the storm began to weaken.
It made landfall on the Texas-Louisiana border as a category three.
Spurred by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina weeks earlier, nearly three million residents in Rita’s path evacuated as the hurricane approached.
This caused gridlock traffic in Houston, fuel shortages and stranded vehicles without gas.
Less than ten direct deaths are reported to have been caused by Rita in Texas, Mississippi and Florida.
Residents of Houston are returning home on the last day of a three-day staggered reentry plan by car.
The city’s airports were opened up Sunday, according to the Houston Chronicle. It said hundreds of thousands are still without power in Houston and other parts of Texas.
Estimated insurance losses caused by Hurricane Rita are between $2.5 billion and $7 billion, according to CNN.com.
Meanwhile, the effects of Rita caused temporarily repaired levees in New Orleans to fail, re-flooding the city’s Ninth Ward only weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.
With pumps already in place, the Army Corps of Engineers expects to have pumped the water out within a week after the levees are fixed.
Other parts of the city have been re-opened for residents to return.
The Weather Channel reported that “the remnants of tropical depression Rita have been absorbed by a Midwestern cold front.”
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