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VIDOR, Texas - Hurricane Rita battered cities and towns along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast today, tearing roofs from buildings, sending trees crashing onto homes and cars, shattering windows in a hospital and a hotel, and stranding some areas in a wash of flood water.

Yet the dominant reaction was relief that the once-dreaded storm proved far less fierce and deadly than Katrina. Authorities pleaded with the roughly 3 million evacuees not to hurry home too soon, fearing more chaos.

"Be patient, stay put," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry. "If you are in a safe place with food, water, bedding, you are better remaining there for the time being."

In any other hurricane season, Rita might have seemed devastating. It knocked out power for more than 1 million customers, sparked fires across the hurricane zone and swamped Louisiana shoreline towns with a 15-foot storm surge that required daring boat and helicopter rescues of hundreds of people.

But the new storm came in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with its 1,000-plus death toll, cataclysmic flooding of New Orleans and staggering destruction in Mississippi. By contrast, Rita spared Houston, New Orleans and other major cities a direct hit.

By mid-afternoon today federal officials said they knew of no storm-related fatalities although one person was killed in Mississippi by a tornado that spun off the remains of the hurricane.

In addition, damage to the vital concentration of oil refineries along the coast appeared relatively light, although industry officials said it was too early to assess whether there would be an impact on oil prices.

All the same there is no discounting the terror of the storm's landfall in howling darkness or the commmunity-wrenching destruction hammered down on Gulf Coastresidents.

At the Frazier Street mobile home park in Vidor, eight miles east of the refinery city of Beaumont, Wayne Baton said he rode out the storm after helping to evacuate elderly neighbors. As the wind crashed giant oaks into roadways and homes and began smashing the windows in his mobile home, Baton said, he fled into the woods, lay on the ground and waited nine hours.

"I knew if I could get into the forest and stay low to the ground I'd be alright," Baton said. After finding dry clothes at a friend's house, Baton returned to his neighborhood, now shut from outside traffic by a hundred-foot oak that was pulled up by the roots and sent crashing onto the main road.

"There's cars flapping under the trees. Windows are gone. Doors are just flapping," Baton said.

Ordinarily, 66 people live in the mobile home park, Baton said. Standing in the middle of shattered trailers and flattened cars, Baton said the population appears to have been reduced to one.

"You're looking at the sum total," he said.

Rita made landfall at 3:38 a.m. EDT as a Category 3 storm just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line, bringing with it a 20-foot storm surge and up to 25 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Center said.

Its 12 mph speed spread worries it would dump nearly 2 feet of rain on flood-prone parts of Texas and Louisiana, spurring tornadoes as it churned north-northwest with winds topping 120 mph.

In the immediate aftermath in Vidor, some homes were left awash in small ponds of storm water and sections of some businesses appear to have been torn away entirely.

"You all been by the flea market? It ain't there anymore," one man shouted to Gene Dixson, who rode out the storm in a century-old, single story wood home that miraculously escaped serious damage. A huge tree missed the place by 20 feet.

Dixson said his night consisted of listening to "the crackling and popping of trees. I don't know how to describe wind blowing."

In Beaumont, several guests and staff at the MCM Elegante Hotel were reported injured when windows shattered in the wind as the hurricane made landfall, said Dr. James Holly, who coordinated medical help from the fifth floor of the Entergy Texas high rise, a glass-fronted tower that received some wind damage and blown windows.

Heavier damage was reported east of Beaumont, along the Sabine Pass near the Texas-Louisiana line, as well as the town of Lake Charles, La., where the storm's eastern eye wall hit land.

"We understand there's major structural damage and where there's structural damage and people were staying in place, there are going to be injuries," Holly said.

The hurricane's center was 90 miles off the coast last night when its forward winds already began tearing into buildings in the city of Port Arthur, and in towns and cities stretching from western Louisiana to Houston.

"If you're already seeing roofs come off when it's 90 miles offshore, it means you're going to see tremendous damage to this community," said Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, chief executive of the county in which Beaumont and Port Arthur are located.

Griffith stayed in a downtown Beaumont high-rise command center, monitoring the storm in advance of its early morning landfall. He worried especially about the levee that protects Port Arthur from the Gulf of Mexico. Built in 1961 after Hurricane Carla, it had been largely untested since then.

From Beaumont north this morning, at least three 16-wheel tractor trailers had been blown over by the heavy winds, one as it traveled east on Interstate 10.

At the Sabine River, farther east of Beaumont, the city of Orange took a massive blow from the winds and, according to some, tornados spawned by the hurricane's force. The eye of the hurricane was thought to have run up the river, which forms a pass.

At a park and marina along the Sabine, the storm plucked the front from a bar, depositing it front-door down in the street, but leaving the bar stools upright and dry. Nearby, a brick building lay scattered on the roadway and the river lapped well over its banks for one or two blocks.

Power lines lay across highways and huge trees, many snapped at the trunk or pulled up by the roots, made many roads impassible. It was 8 a.m. before police and emergency crews ventured out to assess the destruction.

Rita weakened yesterday to Category 3, with winds near 120 mph, after reaching a peak of Category 5 with 175-mph winds earlier in the week. As the outer winds of the still-powerful storm made landfall last night, rescue crews hustled the last of the evacuees into buses, pointed them north, then prepared to huddle inside shelters.

"One guy asked me what I did to protect my house. I said I made sure I gave my insurance papers to my wife before she went north," said Brad Penisson, a Beaumont fire rescue captain, as he helped the elderly, the infirm and sometimes the confused and hesitant into one of dozens of buses.

As the last evacuees left Beaumont and Port Arthur yesterday, state officials held a joint news conference in Houston, advising those who had not yet fled to shelters to stay put and ride out the storm. Roads had become difficult to travel -- bus drivers at the civic center noted that their vehicles can easily be blown off the road in high winds -- and emergency officials said movement had become dangerous, despite indications that Rita could be wobbling into a lower-grade storm.

"This storm is dangerous. We have not disarmed this storm," said Houston Mayor Bill White.

He estimated that the evacuation along the Gulf Coast was "well into the seven figures." The displacement sent tens of thousands into towns unaccustomed to the influx.

Ninety-three miles northwest of Beaumont, arrivals from the Gulf Coast swelled the population of Lufkin, a town of about 33,000, to 100,000, officials said.

Rita jogged slightly north and east from its original path this week, possibly sparing Houston and Galveston the worst hit. But it then threatened the center of the nation's oil and chemical refining industries, setting the stage for possible major disruptions of energy supplies.

"This is about 10 to 11 percent of America's gasoline. It's 30 percent of America's jet fuel. So this is a major impact on the energy supply," said Jefferson County's Griffith, as he looked out from his fifth-floor command center inside the headquarters of Entergy Texas, which volunteered much of its high-rise to emergency crews.

On the horizon was a major refinery still burning off waste oil, sending an inky cloak over Beaumont's harbor and the Natchez River, a key navigational channel that could spill over its banks when Rita hits.

The signs of energy disruption were evident up and down the major roads out of Beaumont and Port Arthur, cities that hug the Texas-Louisiana line.

Cars and trucks were abandoned on some roadsides, out of fuel, while diesel fuel supplies were diverted to make certain that buses and rescue vehicles were drivable.

In the town of Buna, 35 miles north of Beaumont, a closed store and gasoline station became a makeshift campsite, where dozens of families -- low on fuel and with little hope of making it any farther inland -- sat and waited.

"If we don't get gas and stuff, we're going to die here on this highway," said Pat Trahan of Groves, Texas, as she lay across a blanket in the back of the pickup truck she and her husband had been driving north when they ran out of fuel.

With more than 1 million people fleeing the path of the storm, Trahan became locked in traffic along U.S. 96, a major artery. It took the Trahans 14 hours to travel 60 miles before they joined a small city of evacuees parked at the service station, where the signs announced grimly, "Out of Gas."

In Beaumont, a final surge of evacuees arrived at the town's civic center, rushing to meet a noon deadline to make a bus. Darren Wallace, who took names and addresses from the evacuees and directed them to a bus, was frustrated that some of Beaumont's 114,000 residents -- he could only guess that they numbered 1,000 -- refused to budge, despite the warning of a possible 15- to 20-foot storm surge and lashing winds.

"All we can do is ask them to leave. If not, we'll pick 'em up in a body bag," an exasperated Wallace said.

Nearby in the port, two freighters, The Cape Victory and the Cape Vincent, were anchored, loaded with hundreds of emergency vehicles to be deployed after the storm subsides.

Over the past week, with roads clogged and thousands unable to move for lack of cars or fuel, emergency teams orchestrated an airlift of several thousand evacuees from Beaumont's regional airport. It began after Griffith, the county executive, made an angry plea during a conference call with state and federal officials.

Initially, four days ago, Department of Defense officials promised to send in aircraft to help evacuate elderly and frail residents from nursing homes and hospitals. "They told us they were going to send aircraft. We got three," Griffith said.

On a subsequent conference call, "I told them that if anything happened, the blood of these people was going to be on their hands. I told them, 'These people are going to die if we have a direct hit.' "

Griffith said White House officials intervened, freeing up scores of planes, and that several thousand people were airlifted to safety from the Beaumont-Port Arthur area.

Last night, Griffith said, he also had an assistant U.S. attorney stop the federal Transportation Security Administration from screening patients and other evacuees boarding flights, which had slowed the evacuation effort.

The last major hurricane to strike the region was Alicia in 1983, which hit Houston and left 21 dead.

Port Arthur, which juts directly into the water, all but emptied of its 58,000 residents yesterday. One of them, Collins Vital Sr., loaded his family and what belongings he could throw together onto one of the buses at the Beaumont civic center, a day after most of the town had fled. "There was no sense trying to leave yesterday, with all the traffic," he said. "I usually ride them out, but this one's headed straight here."

Some families split their evacuations into two phases. Heather Broussard, a 25-year-old mother of two girls, ages 2 and 5, kissed her father, Mike Marsiglia, goodbye before she climbed onto a bus.

Marsiglia said he and his wife would drive their car "as far north as we can get, we're not sure where," but wanted their daughter and grandchildren in a designated shelter.

"The transmission's acting kind of hinky," Marsiglia said of his car. "If we break down, we can take care of ourselves. We want to look out for them."

Hours later, the outer edges of Hurricane Rita, a storm that at points covered half the Gulf of Mexico, would make land.