Rita Evacuees Killed As Bus Explodes

Up to 20 people fleeing Hurricane Rita were killed when the bus they were travelling in exploded in Texas today.

The bus was engulfed by flames outside Dallas on Interstate 45, which was heavily congested as people tried to get out of the path of the approaching storm.

The Dallas television station WFAA reported that 20 people had died in the bus blaze. Sergeant Don Peritz, the Dallas County sheriff's spokesman, said he believed the final death toll would be close to that number.

"There were 45 souls on the bus ... at this point we believe we have about half accounted for," he said. "The early indications are that this is a mechanical issue. The driver did survive the accident."

Sgt Peritz said there were signs that oxygen being used by elderly evacuees could have played a role in the fire. The burnt-out shell of the bus stood at the side of the road, surrounded by police cars and ambulances.

Hurricane Rita is nearing the Texas coastline ahead of its expected landfall north-east of Houston tomorrow. Almost 2 million people in the path of the storm - which will bring 140mph winds and a storm surge of up to 20ft - have been told to evacuate.

They include most of the 1.2 million residents of Houston and up to 58,000 people in Galveston, a city that was devastated by a hurricane in 1900 with the loss of up to 12,000 lives.

Traffic jams stretched 100 miles north of Houston and crossed the state line into Louisiana even after the Texas governor, Rick Perry, ruled that every lane of the Interstate-45 motorway should be used to help traffic flow out of the city.

"You've done the right thing by leaving two days before Hurricane Rita makes landfall," Mr Perry told residents. "You will get out of the coastal region on time. It's just going to take some time."

State officials promised to bring more than 757,000 litres of petrol to service stations along the motorway as cars ran out of fuel in the gridlock.

As traffic ground to a halt, frustrated drivers got out of cars to walk their dogs or talk to passengers in other vehicles. Others gave up and turned their cars round to head back into the city.

Trazanna Moreno returned to Houston after leaving her home and covering just six miles in almost three hours. "It could be that if we ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere, we'd be in a worse position in a car dealing with hurricane-force winds than we would in our house," she said.

Another Houston resident, Judie Anderson, travelled only 45 miles in 12 hours as she left her home in the suburb of LaPorte. "This is the worst planning I've ever seen," she said. "They say we've learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina. Well, you couldn't prove it by me."

Fuel shortages were looming on a national as well as local level as Exxon Mobil decided to close the US's largest oil refinery in Baytown, Texas.

The Gulf coast produces one third of US oil, but hurricanes Katrina and Rita have put 13 of the country's refineries out of action, cutting around 30% of US refining capacity.

Environmentalists warned of a worst case scenario in which a storm surge spilled oil or chemicals from bayous into Houston, inundating mostly poor, Hispanic neighbourhoods on the city's south side.

The US National Hurricane Centre today said Rita was moving to the north-west at 10mph, with storm surges of 25ft expected later this afternoon. The storm yesterday weakened from a category five to category four storm, but forecasters expect it to reach land with winds of at least 130mph.

Rita, which is 400 miles wide, is expected to shear away from Houston and hit land close to the Texas-Louisiana border at Port Arthur or Lake Charles, but meteorologists have been unable to make definite predictions.

As darkness fell in Galveston, a huge cloud formation filled the south-eastern sky. Gulf waters began washing onto the shore underneath expensive waterfront houses built on stilts. The urban area, protected by a 17ft sea wall, is only 8ft above sea level.

The last major hurricane to strike the Houston area was category three Alicia in 1983. It flooded downtown Houston, spawned 22 tornadoes and killed 21 people.

In New Orleans, there were fears that rain on the fringes of the storm could breach levees and inundate parts of the city, which is only just drying out after being flooded by Hurricane Katrina on August 29. At least 1,066 people were killed by Katrina, which also displaced as many as 1 million residents.

The forecast was for up to 5in of rain in the coming days - dangerously close to the amount engineers said could send floodwaters pouring back into neighbourhoods.

In the city's lower Ninth Ward, where water broke through a levee earlier this month and caused some of the worst flooding, there was standing water 1ft deep in areas that had been dry a day earlier.

The Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, urged up to 500,000 residents of the state's south-west coast to flee north. "Rita has Louisiana in her sights," she said." You cannot go east, you cannot go west. If you know the local roads that go north, take those."

She warned anyone who refused to leave that they should take steps to aid their own post-mortem identifications. "Perhaps they should write their social security numbers on their arms with indelible ink," she said.

The US president, George Bush - heavily criticised for the slow government response to Katrina - was planning to visit Texas today to view the emergency preparations.