Ike floods roads, whips waves along Texas

HOUSTON — Hurricane Ike, a colossal storm nearly as big as Texas itself, began battering the coast Friday, threatening to obliterate waterfront towns and give the skyscrapers, refineries and docks of the nation's fourth-largest city their worst pounding in a generation.

As the storm closed in, it trapped 60 people who had to be rescued from the floodwaters by helicopter, sent towering waves smashing over the 17-foot Galveston seawall, breached levees in rural Louisiana, and tossed around a disabled 584-foot cargo ship in the Gulf of Mexico.

About a million people in low-lying coastal areas were ordered to get out well ahead of the storm. But authorities in three counties alone said roughly 90,000 of them refused, despite a warning from forecasters that those staying behind in Galveston faced "certain death."

"I believe in the man up there, God," said William Steally, a 75-year-old retiree who planned to ride out the storm in Galveston without his wife or sister-in-law. "I believe he will take care of me."

At about 600 miles across, the hurricane was one of the largest in recent memory, taking up almost the entire northern half of the Gulf of Mexico.

As of 5 p.m. EDT, Ike was centered about 135 miles southeast of Galveston, moving at 12 mph. It was a Category 2 storm, with winds of 105 mph, but was expected to strengthen to a Category 3, or at least 111 mph, by the time it hit land.

Forecasters predicted it would come ashore somewhere near Galveston late Friday or early Saturday and pass almost directly over Houston.

Because of the hurricane's size, the state's shallow coastal waters and its largely unprotected coastline, forecasters said the biggest threat would be flooding and storm surge, with Ike expected to hurl a wall of water two stories high — 20 to 25 feet — at the coastline.

To avoid highway gridlock, authorities instructed most of Houston's 2 million residents to just hunker down.

Still, authorities warned that the storm could travel up Galveston Bay and send a surge up the Houston Ship Channel and into the port of Houston, the nation's second-busiest port — a complex of docks, pipelines, depots and warehouses that receives automobiles, consumer products, industrial equipment and other cargo from around the world and ships out vast amounts of petrochemicals and agricultural products.

The oil and gas industry was also closely watching Ike because it was headed straight for the nation's biggest complex of refineries and petrochemical plants. Wholesale gasoline prices jumped to around $4.85 a gallon for fear of shortages.