“Be calm, be strong, say a prayer for Texas,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in the state capital, Austin.

Even before the storm hit shore, it was creating havoc: The mass exodus of residents from the coastal area created monumental traffic jams along evacuation routes. As many as 24 people were killed when a bus carrying evacuees from a Houston retirement home burst into flames.

Even though the winds had slowed, the storm surge was already taking a toll in areas previously hit by Hurricane Katrina. In rainy New Orleans, water poured over a patched levee, gushing into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods - the hard-hit and largely empty Ninth Ward - and heightening fears that Rita would flood the devastated city all over again.

At 11 p.m. ET, the storm was centered about 55 miles southeast of Sabine Pass, Texas, at the border between Texas and Louisiana. It was moving northwest about 12 mph and was expected to come ashore early Saturday on a course that could spare Houston and Galveston but slam the oil refining towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, La., with a 20-foot storm surge, towering waves and up to 25 inches of rain.

“That’s where people are going to die,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. “All these areas are just going to get absolutely clobbered by the storm surge.”

“If it’s 20 feet, there’s going to be horrific destruction in Port Arthur [and] Galveston,” Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told MSNBC-TV’s Rita Cosby. “Most of Port Arthur would be underwater.”