Hurricane Rita

GALVESTON, Texas — Although Hurricane Rita was downgraded to a Category 4 storm Thursday afternoon as it swirled toward the Gulf Coast with sustained winds measured at 150 mph, more than 1.3 million residents are fleeing Texas and Louisiana.

"It's not worth staying here," said Celia Martinez as she and several relatives finished packing up their homes and pets to head to Houston. "Life is more important than things."

An estimated 1.8 million residents or more in Texas and Louisiana were under orders to evacuate to avoid a deadly repeat of Hurricane Katrina .

Traffic on some of Texas' main arteries was at a virtual standstill Thursday morning as people tried to move inland from the coastal areas. Drivers ran out of gas in 14-hour jams or looked in vain for a place to stay as hotels hundreds of miles in from the coast filled up. Others got tired of waiting in traffic and turned around and went home.

Texas authorities were to begin airlifting at least 9,000 people from Beaumont and Houston, including nursing home residents, those without transportation and the homeless, to inland Texas cities. Military troops in South Texas also started moving north and schools, businesses and universities were closed.

"This is a big, dangerous storm. It's a massive storm. It covers half of the Gulf of Mexico. It is still very unpredictable," said R. David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency , in a news conference Thursday afternoon.

But preparations were going smoothly, he added.

"The evacuations are going very well," Paulison said. "We still feel we have plenty of time to get those people out of harm's way before this storm makes landfall sometime tomorrow."

As Texas Gov. Rick Perry  urged residents along the state's entire coast to begin evacuating well in advance of Rita's predicted Saturday landfall, outer bands of rain began lashing New Orleans on Thursday, the first rainfall since Hurricane Katrina, raising fears that the patched-up levee system could fail and swamp the below-sea-level city all over again.

"I've never seen a storm like this. This is worse than, it looks like it's worse than even Katrina," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who lives 45 miles in from the coast in Sugarland, told FOX News Thursday morning.