Thousands of undergraduate students were forced to flee Tulane University last month after Hurricane Katrina debilitated their downtown New Orleans campus. One hundred and six of those displaced students enrolled at sister school Rice University in Houston, Texas, shortly thereafter.

In a situation which can only be described as cruelly ironic, Hurricane Rita is expected to storm into Texas sometime within the next 24 hours, and Rice students already have evacuated the city.

"I would say [there is] probably about a 90 percent chance that it hits Texas," local meteorologist Gary Cannalte said. "The other 10 percent would be far western Louisiana."

As of Thursday evening, Cannalte said the storm was teetering on the line between a Category 4 and Category 5 hurricane — the highest possible level — but that by the time it crosses the coastline, it will probably be a Category 4, possibly even a high 3.

"It's forecast to slow down and kind of sit over eastern Texas, perhaps for a couple of days," Cannalte said, adding such a development would likely deliver 15 to 30 inches of rain and could result in extensive flooding, although not to the proportions of sub-sea level New Orleans.

"With Rita, Galveston Island would be somewhat at risk because it is fairly low, but it wouldn't stay [underwater]," he said.

Eric Gerber, communications director for the University of Houston system, said all four campuses were closed Wednesday at noon and in the best case scenario will reopen no sooner than Sunday.

Gerber said the mass evacuation of the campuses is not an overreaction to Hurricane Katrina.

"The flagship campus [in June 2001] was inundated by tropical storm Allison," he said. "We suffered a lot of water damage from that so we've been especially weary of the vulnerability of the campus since then. This storm on its own terms, if we had never even heard of Katrina, would still have motivated a very serious response."

Margot Dimond, Rice University director of news and media relations, said the campus experienced "very minimal damage" as a result of tropical storm Allison, and thinks that bodes well for how Rice will hold up this weekend.

"Geographically and in historical terms, we are one of the better places to be," she said. "No one can predict what any individual storm will do, but we've been in pretty good shape before."

Cannalte said although eastern Texas and western Louisiana are at the most risk, inland metropolitan areas such as San Antonio or Dallas-Forth Worth could potentially suffer serious flooding.

"The latest computer models brought the storm in as far as Dallas-Fort Worth, maybe as far inland as San Antonio," he said. "It all depends on the overall weather pattern. I look back to tropical storm Allison in Houston — it was a minimal tropical storm, but then it just kind of sat over eastern Texas for two or three days, just dropping heavy amounts of rain."

Although parts of southeastern Texas and some Houston neighborhoods have been evacuated, Dimond said Houston as a whole will not be evacuated, and both Gerber and Dimond plan to ride out the storm from their Houston homes.

"There are a number of people stuck on the freeway trying to get out of town, but most Houstonians, unless you're in a flood-zone area, you really don't need to leave," Dimond said. "But it's still going to be a very big storm and nobody's happy about it."

Gerber said he hopes the storm will pass through quickly and allow the university system to examine any damage to the campuses on Sunday.

"I'm going to ride out the storm not at campus but here at my house," he said. "And I'll be going back to campus on Sunday, I hope."