Three emergency shelters have been established in The Woodlands to care for evacuees who got caught up in the bottleneck on I-45 leading out of Houston. The shelters are at The Woodlands High School at 6101 Research Forest Drive in The Woodlands 77381-4902, The Woodlands College Park High School at 3701 College Park Dr. in The Woodlands 77384, and The Woodlands McCullough Junior High School at 3800 South Panther Creek in The Woodlands 77381-2799. The Reverend Howard Huhn, the Minister of Outreach at The Woodlands United Methodist Church has sent out this email requesting the following:

Dear Friends,
Because of the traffic associated with Hurricane Rita, our local high schools (McCullough, TWHS, College Park) have opened as shelters. They are in need of bedding. If you have bedding available, please drop it off directly at the schools.
Thank you for being Christ to others.
Howard Huhn
Minister of Outreach
The Woodlands United Methodist Church

Jeff Master’s latest update of just a few minutes ago indicates that experts are increasingly forming a consensus that Houston and Galveston will avoid a direct hit from Hurricane Rita:

The latest computer models are tightly clustered around a landfall point just west of the Texas/Louisiana border. Confidence is high in this forecast. Houston and Galveston should escape major wind and storm surge damage, and only experience maximum sustained winds of 60 mph with gusts to 85 mph. It is still too early to tell what will happen after landfall, as the models all take Rita different ways. A major rainwater flooding problem will ensue after Rita’s landfall, with 10 – 30 inches of rain falling over a large area of Texas and Louisiana.

For the first time since Hurricane Rita entered the Gulf earlier in the week, the cone of uncertainty that shows the range where the hurricane force winds will hit does not include a substantial portion of the Houston area, essentially that part west of I-45.

Houston awakens this morning to the news that the two most likely locations for landfall are Port Arthur and Galveston. The cone of uncertainty extends from southwestern Louisiana on the east to the entire Houston metro area on the west. The National Hurricane Center is currently predicting landfall to occur in Jefferson County near Port Arthur, while local experts are predicting landfall slightly west in Chambers County nearer Galveston Bay (county map here). As Rita continues to move slowly with its eye about 260 miles southeast of Galveston, a consensus has developed that the storm will move into northeast Texas after landfall and then stall on Sunday and Monday, potentially causing huge amounts of rainfall of the type that flooded the Houston area during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Landfall is expected at this point sometime in the early morning hours of Saturday, probably between 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., although heavy rainfall and strong winds throughout the Houston area will be experienced well before then.
Houston, get ready to rumble.

After the jolting early morning news that Hurricane Rita was heading directly toward Galveston Bay, the track models have been trending further eastward for most of the day. The current most likely projection is that the storm will make landfall east of Galveston Bay closer to Port Arthur and Beaumont and, if that happens, most of the Houston metro area would at least be spared a direct hit by the most damaging winds around the storm’s eyewall.
However, the key words here are “most likely,” which means that there is a very small percentage difference between the storm making landfall at one spot over another. Stated another way, the chance that the storm could come onshore directly on Galveston Bay is still very likely. The storm is reacting to the movement of three weather systems to its north, and it’s simply impossible at this point to determine with any reasonable degree of certainty where the storm will make landfall between Freeport, Tx to Lafayette, La. My sense is that it will not be until early Friday morning before the experts will really have a good handle on how the storm is finally going to react to the weather systems to its north and thus, where landfall will occur. Moreover, even that very good prediction can be as much as 30-50 miles off if the storm wobbles even slightly while coming onshore. Remember, Katrina wobbled east at almost the last minute and spared New Orleans a direct hit.
Thus, the bottom line is to remain vigilant in following this storm. It looks like the storm will be at least a strong category 3 when the it somes onshore, and a storm of that magnitude — even if it comes onshore well east of Galveston Bay — will cause very dangerous wind and rainfall in the entire Houston metro area.

As you peruse the current projected path of Rita almost directly over Galveston Bay, contemplate Jeff Masters’ latest analysis of the situation:

The latest runs of two key computer models, the GFS and GFDL, now indicate that the trough of low pressure that was expected to pick up Rita and pull her rapidly northward through Texas will not be strong enough to do so. Instead, these models forecast that Rita will make landfall near Galveston, penetrate inland between 50 and 200 miles, then slowly drift southwestward for nearly two days, as a high pressure ridge will build in to her north. Finally, a second trough is forecast to lift Rita out of Texas on Tuesday. If this scenario develops, not only will the coast receive catastrophic damage from the storm surge, but interior Texas, including the Dallas/Fort Worth area, might see a deluge of 15 – 30 inches of rain. A huge portion of Texas would be a disaster area.

This scenario is similar to that of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 that caused catastrophic flooding throughout the Houston metropolitan area. Moreover, with Allison, Houston did not have to deal with the catastrophic wind damage that is almost certain to result from Rita. Although the new projected path of Rita is not good news for Houston, the prediction that the storm might slow down at landfall and stall over Texas and Louisiana is even worse.