Hurricane Rita claimed its first victims yesterday when a bus carrying evacuees out of Houston burst into flames when a passenger's oxygen tank caught fire, killing at least 24 elderly people, writes Denis Staunton.
The 44 passengers which included six staff had been evacuated from a nursing home in the city's Bellaire suburb on Thursday and had been on the jammed interstate highway ever since.
An estimated 2½ million people have left their homes in southern Texas and southwest Louisiana in the hope of escaping the storm, which threatens to be as powerful as Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people last month. Rita is expected to make landfall at about lunchtime Irish time today.
Misery returned to New Orleans yesterday when a recently repaired levee started to crumble and surrounding streets began to flood.
Army engineers fear that the city's patched-up levees may not survive Rita and that much of the city could soon be under water again.
The rainfall caused renewed flooding in New Orleans's ninth ward, the hardest-hit region of the city. More than a million people were trapped on the roads leading out of Houston yesterday as vehicles ran out of petrol and overheated brakes caught fire.
Texas governor Rick Perry said he would rather have people stuck in traffic for 10 hours and escape than stay, as the category four storm bore down on the Gulf coast with 225km/h (140mph) winds, 8m (26ft) storm surges and forecasts of 50cm (20in) of rain.
The storm veered away from Houston and Galveston towards the upper Texas coast of Beaumont and Port Arthur, but oil refineries in the region remain vulnerable.