Frank, I've been a Florida resident all my life.
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Katrina is to hurricane damage what Chernobyl is to commercial nuclear power generation in the Western Nations.
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I'm not saying Rita is going to be a pushover, but the vast majority of the damage will be confined to the first 50-odd miles from the coastal lowlands, flooding because we keep building things without paying attention to the watershed, and a bit of it solely because of the size of the thing increases the areal chances of minor damage randomly becoming serious damage.
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I'd probably evacuate, but only if I lived within 50 miles of the coast or low-lying areas.
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Of the potential natural disasters, I'll take a hurricane any day. You tend to die in a hurricane because you're stupid, not because of the 'cane itself.
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You get drunk, you fail to make sensible preparations, you have some ridiculously bad luck.
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Rarely is it because of something that you could not have handled better if you'd had the slightest brain cell working.
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It's a friggin' big storm. You respect it... but, unlike an earthquake, tornadoes, avalanches, blizzards, etc., you know the silly-ass thing is coming, you know how big it is going to be within limits (hence, evacuate for cat 5, maybe for 4, and put up lots of plywood for 3 or 2) and, in any case, get to higher ground if you're not already on it -- as in at least 100 feet above sea level.
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Heck, this bloody thing has already dropped all the way to cat 3 -- its only hope of major damage comes from a few possibilities:
1) Stuff already weakened by Katrina, and but not knocked down and not torn down by anyone with sense
2) Stuff right on the coast
3) Stuff weakened by the lack of a recent hurricane to clear out borderline deadwood
4) Really, really stupid people.
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Hell, even NOLA could have probably weathered this one without much damage if it weren't for Katrina's knockout punch softening it up.
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People are just getting hysterical as a result of all the graphics from the last two years, it's positively hilarious how overblown the whole hurricane thing is. People have no perspective on the past, since the 80s and the 90s were so damned easy with regards to hurricanes.

> This is more like a 100 mile wide sustained tornado.

No, it's not. A tornado has sustained interior winds of well over 200 miles per hour, as high as 300 mph. This makes for a MUCH MUCH greater pressure gradient. Most structures explode from inner air pressure when confronted with a tornado.

If you do a simple calculation, at a bit less than 15 pounds per square inch, assuming a pressure drop of even 10% (stats on this aren't readily available, but 5-10% seems likely reasonable for this guesstimate's purposes), that would put a pressure of 1.5 pounds per square inch, or 216 pounds per square FOOT. Structural walls are just not designed to handle the weight of two or three football teams bouncing on them.

While a hurricane has very lowered air pressure to compare with a tornado, it's not a sharp **gradient** like a tornado. The interior of a house is also lowered in pressure, hence the air therein doesn't place anywhere near the same kind of stress on the walls. Most of the damage in a hurricane is through loose objects picked up (or broken free, as with a tree limb weakened by disease or age) and tossed around... in the case of a cat 4 or 5, then there is some notable chance of the wind getting under something and thus doing damage by sheer "sail" pressure on it, as a torn-off roof. This can happen with lesser 'canes, but it's much less common and less likely.

Again, you respect a hurricane -- it's a big, powerful storm system -- but it's a big, lumbering thing, and sense and rational caution are far more important than random luck. It's the only natural disaster (well, excepting somethng like Mt. St. Helens) that applies to.