GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) – Eleven members of a Maine National Guard security team will ride out Hurricane Rita at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, but the Marine Maritime training ship State of Maine will remain docked in New Orleans.

The soldiers arrived late Monday afternoon and were beginning their mission protecting and patrolling a military facility damaged by Hurricane Katrina that has become a staging ground for relief efforts when they received word Tuesday that they’d have to leave because of the latest hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

The troops were taking no chances after Rita swiped the Florida Keys and began gathering strength to Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds in the gulf. It threatened hit the coast of Texas or Louisiana by week’s end.

“We came here to help people who are hurt,” Chief Master Sgt. Allen Graves told the team. “I didn’t come here to get hurt ourselves.”

In New Orleans, meanwhile, the State of Maine arrived Sunday to serve as a floating hotel for dock crews and relief workers.

Captain Larry Wade said he made a decision to leave the 500-foot ship docked on the Mississippi River as opposed to riding out the storm at sea.

“I don’t want to go to sea,” he said. “We’d have to find a course to steer through those oil rigs – some of them were damaged in Katrina and haven’t been repaired and still don’t have any lights. I don’t want to be out there playing around with those rigs.”

The last word, he said, was that the ship would remain at its dock and ride out the storm there. “We’ll just batten down our hatches,” he said.

The Maine National Guard team set up camp in the sweltering heat at one of two tent cities at the Air National Guard’s Combat Readiness Training Center in Gulfport.

Even as Graves and Maj. Joel Nadeau attempted to arrange for transportation to Florida, members of the team began regular patrols on the base, each toting a 9-millimeter Beretta and an M-4 automatic rifle.

Much like regular police officers, their job is to patrol the base and deal with troublemakers. They carry handcuffs and wear fatigues with special blue arm bands to denote them as security forces.

The base suffered its share of Katrina’s wrath, though some services are up and running.

President Bush surveyed the area this week and was whisked on the base Tuesday by a caravan of vehicles to the waiting Air Force One.

U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, also visited the area, meeting unexpectedly on Monday with the Maine Guard team on the base runway. Within the senator’s sight were white tents on the far side of the runway that house a tightly secured temporary morgue.

Elsewhere on base, blue tarps cover holes in a number of roofs, and the water is unsafe to drink. Milk jugs, clothing and other garbage still litter the fence on the perimeter of the base and neighboring airport, flung there by 145-mph winds.

Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com