French oil company Total announced Thursday that it had shut down all its operations in the Texas Gulf Coast region, evacuating staff from a dozen sites because of Hurricane Rita.

A spokesman for Total said at its headquarters in Paris that some 1,000 local staff had been evacuated on Wednesday from its offshore Virgo oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Today, we evacuated our land-based installations in the region of Houston, in particular the Port Arthur refinery, closed at 11. 00 am local time," said the spokesman.

Other oil majors were also shutting down their operations as Hurricane Rita, one of the biggest storms ever recorded in the region, bears down on the Texas coast.

Hurricane Rita is expected to make a landfall on the Texas coast early on Saturday.

Source: Xinhua