United States: Millions of people who fled Hurricane Rita last week have been told to stay away, despite relief the storm caused few deaths and less damage than many feared.
Federal and state authorities in Texas and Louisiana are seeking to stagger the return of evacuees in the hope of avoiding a repeat of the 20-hour traffic jams seen last week when nearly three million tried to escape the storm.
Rita tore roofs of houses along the Gulf Coast where Texas meets Louisiana, blocking roads with debris for hundreds of miles and leaving more than a million people without electricity.
A 15ft storm surge left much of Lake Charles, a Louisiana city that depends on casinos and chemical factories, under water, and heavy rain and strong winds pushed holes through New Orleans's patched-up levees, flooding parts of the city again.
The storm passed by Houston and Galveston, the two biggest cities in its projected path. New Orleans was spared the massive storm surges that could have overwhelmed its levees completely, as Hurricane Katrina did last month.
Oil companies said that most refineries in the region were undamaged and would soon be back in operation. Insurers guessed the storm had caused about $5 billion (€4.2 billion) worth of damage, much less than the $35 billion expected if it had hit Houston and Galveston.
Texas governor Rick Perry cautioned evacuees against going home immediately, however, warning that some areas were still unsafe and that a mass return could create traffic chaos.
"Be patient, stay put," he said. "If you are in a safe place with food, water, bedding, you are better remaining there for the time being."
The federal government, stung by criticism of its slow response to Katrina, was on full alert. President Bush, who stayed on holiday at his ranch while Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, monitored Rita's progress from a military command post in Colorado.
He waited four days to visit Mississippi and Louisiana after Katrina but was in Texas by Saturday afternoon to inspect the relief effort after Rita.
"The first order of business now is the search and rescue teams, to pull people out of harm's way," said Mr Bush.
Rescue teams and medical units were in the most-badly hit areas within hours of the storm's impact, and National Guard troops stood by to maintain order and prevent looting.
David Paulison, acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) said the timely evacuation of millions from southern Texas and Louisiana had prevented the hurricane from killing more people.
"The damage is not as serious as we had expected it to be. The evacuations worked," he said.
The evacuation was, if anything, too comprehensive, with hundreds of thousands fleeing parts of Houston that were never under threat, clogging the highways and blocking beds in hotels and shelters further north.
Twenty-four elderly people died when a bus evacuating them from a nursing home in Houston exploded on the highway. Mechanical problems started a fire which ignited oxygen tanks carried by some of the patients.
It emerged at the weekend that the private company that operated the bus had a history of financial problems and that its driver-safety record was worse than 97 per cent of all bus companies.
Houston's mayor envisaged only a partial evacuation of the city, focused on those living in flimsy mobile homes or in low-lying districts vulnerable to flooding. Fearful of a repeat of Katrina, which left thousands stranded in New Orleans and killed more than 1,000 people, many decided to leave their homes in safer parts of Houston and join millions heading north.
Stuck in traffic for hours, many ran out of fuel. A plan by the authorities was slowed down by the discovery that nozzles on the tankers carrying the extra fuel were too big for domestic cars.
"We got the fuel out onto the roads, but they couldn't get it into the cars," Ben Sebree of the Texas Oil and Gas Association told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.
The White House has promised to make federal funds available for debris removal and emergency protection, grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other disaster relief.
Mr Bush has ruled out increasing taxes to pay for the estimated $200 billion cost of cleaning up and rebuilding New Orleans and surrounding areas after Hurricane Katrina and rehousing hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have demanded part of the cost be offset by cuts in other parts of the federal budget, but Senate majority leader Tom De Lay said on Saturday that he saw no scope for such cuts.
"I don't have any targets that come to mind right now . . . Everybody wants offsets but frankly I don't think we'll be able to find offsets to pay for Katrina and Rita," he said. An opinion poll last week suggested that cutting the cost of the US military engagement in Iraq is the most popular option for funding the cost of the hurricanes.