VIDOR, Texas -- Dazed after a night of shuddering wind and crashing trees, the remaining population of the Frazier Road trailer court stood in a morning rain, a beer clutched in his left hand, shaken to his Texas roots.

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Wayne Baton said he helped some neighbors flee the Frazier Street mobile home park, holed up in his mobile home and then scurried into the nearby woods when Hurricane Rita lashed his trailer with 120-mph winds.

"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.

He clambered over the tangle of huge tree trunks, slogged through a swamp, looked over to a now-windowless trailer where some residents left two knapsacks filled with clothing on what remained of the porch. Sodden from a night of hurricane rains, they were almost too heavy to lift.

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

Ordinarily, 66 people live in the mobile home park. Now, Baton said, "you're looking at the sum total."

The debris of homes and businesses, the sight of large churches with chunks bitten from their peaked roofs, of cars swamped and homes marooned in sudden lakes, this was the seamless backdrop for the 70 miles between Beaumont, Texas, to Lake Charles, La., after Rita departed yesterday morning.

In Vidor, a small city eight miles north of Beaumont, the streets were littered with remnants of lives most residents fled a day earlier.

"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, the seat of Jefferson County and home to several massive oil refineries, 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.

Rita made landfall almost directly into the Sabine River, along the Texas-Louisiana line, whipping rain and fierce winds in a counter-clockwise motion that mowed across low-lying towns. Initial reports suggested the region had been spared fatalities, but officials such as Holly warned against unbridled optimism. He had just received word about windows blowing out at one of the city hospitals.

"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," he said.

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

At the mouth of the Sabine River, the small city of Orange took a massive blow from the winds as the eye of the storm groaned through.

Near the marina, where boats dock to use Sabine Lake, Rita plucked the front from a bar, depositing its 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.

"There is extreme damage. The downtown area is inaccessible and some of the in-town areas are inaccessible," said Orange Mayor Brown Claybar. Like virtually every other town in the storm area, Orange was without power. "I don't see any way we can have power back in less than 72 hours," he said.

Port Arthur, on the western shore of Sabine Lake, near the point it joins the Gulf of Mexico, received one of the heaviest batterings, with commercial and pleasure craft swamped, some of it sunk, and portions of the city's western side under eight feet of water, said Derrick Wilson, a paramedic sent out to assess damage.

"I would say at least 90 to 95 percent of the city got out," Wilson said. He had no reports of injuries, but worried about conditions in west Port Arthur and any residents who might have stayed behind.

One who didn't leave was Michael Vanty, who stayed behind to look after his motel, the Driftwood Inn. Vanty said he cowered inside the building, casting about for a way to shut down a broken natural gas line. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., the roof tore away. By sunrise, the motel stood roofless, windows smashed and portions of the sign torn away.

"The roof is off and the gas line is broken. It's very dangerous," Vanty said. He drove to his house in Port Arthur.

"It's gone," he said. "A tree came down. The house is gone.".

On 27th Street, along the fringe of Port Arthur's flood area, a family of seven stood on a battered porch, occasionally ducking a duo of stray pit bulls that had taken over an abandoned building and sometimes dashed at them as they waited for someone to drive them to a safe home.

Judith Broussard said she decided to wait out the storm -- a painful miscalculation.

"I waited until the last minute, thinking it was gonna do like they all do: turn, or whatever," Broussard said. "By the time I got ready to go, the whole town was already gone. I couldn't get nowhere."

Broussard said the windows blew out of her bedroom and then the roof collapsed in two different phases.

"I knew it was an old house. It was creaky. It started shaking about 4 o'clock this morning and then it started to go down."

Lake Charles officials struggled through floodwaters in the hours after Rita passed through.

The Louisiana city, which has grown with the arrival of riverboat casinos, saw one of the floating gambling houses break loose from its moorings and drift off. Barges were pushed loose around the refineries and the PPG chemical plant and one apparently struck a bridge.

The worst damage, though, came in the city's downtown, which emergency crews reached by chainsaw, cutting their way through downed trees, opening the road for the onrush of hundreds of emergency personnel who had waited out the storm 50 miles away, said Bill Bergeron, who oversaw the first search and rescue operations from the city's leaking, wind-ripped convention center.

"It's all over, and it's bad," said deputy sheriff Darrell Gill, after he edged his police cruiser through several feet of water on Ryan Street, one of the town's main thoroughfares.

Storefronts were broken, some torn away entirely. A brick building tumbled into its parking lot, its windows now empty frames.

On one end of the street, Wilbert Victor stayed behind in the back of his shoe repair shop, hoping to guard his tools and equipment.

"It got entirely out of hand," Victor said. "The building would have done fine if it wasn't for the glass blowing out." When the glass front of the shop blew out, the winds tore away the interior ceiling and tore away at the contents.

Victor described a night of watching trees, trash and pieces of buildings fly down Ryan Street before he fled to an interior room in the back and listened to the storm.

"It was something I never heard before, a howling sound," Victor said. "All kinds of noises -- things hitting against the building. I still don't know what it was on top of the roof, rattling."

Victor spent the afternoon and early evening examining the 50-year-old leather stitching equipment on which he relies for his living. After that, he planned to drive four miles to Catalina Street, to check on his house.

"I hate to even think about it," he said.