Via AP:

NEW ORLEANS — Water poured over a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods and heightening fears that Hurricane Rita would re-flood this devastated city.

“Our worst fears came true. The levee will breach if we keep on the path we are on right now, which will fill the area that was flooded earlier,” Barry Guidry with the Georgia National Guard.

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal. On the street that runs parallel to the canal, the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast.

The impoverished neighborhood was one of the areas of the city hit hardest by Katrina’s floodwaters and finally had been pumped dry before Hurricane Rita struck.

Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said water is rushing over part of the levee that previously was breached.

More from CNN:

Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Mitch Frazier said: “Right now, it’s a wait and see and hope for the best.”

Gov. Kathleen Blanco has urged residents in Louisiana’s coastal parishes to evacuate northward immediately.

“The levees are in weakened conditions,” Blanco said Thursday. “Everything is fragile in the Orleans impact area, and that includes St. Bernard and Plaquemines and some of the low-lying parishes.

Meanwhile, folks in Texas are worried about their levees:

Though no city on the Texas coast has New Orleans’ disadvantage of lying primarily below sea level, many of them rely for hurricane protection on levees whose adequacy never has been tested against a Katrina- or Rita-size storm.

The industrial areas of the cities of Port Arthur, east of Houston, Texas City, on Galveston Bay and Freeport, to the south, are guarded by levees designed to withstand a 14-foot surge. A Category 4 hurricane could have storm surges of 15 to 20 feet above the usual tide levels, the National Hurricane Center says.

Galveston’s 17-foot-high seawall, built after a catastrophic hurricane in 1900, was designed to withstand a surge of water from a major storm. But it doesn’t protect two-thirds of the island, and beachfront homes and newer developments would be devastated if the storm strikes there, said James Gibeaut, a coastal geologist with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in Austin.

“It’s totally unprotected,” Gibeaut said.

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