Hurricane Ike Batters Texas Coastline

September 13, 2008

GALVESTON, TX (WALL STREET JOURNAL) - Hurricane Ike began moving away from Houston and was expected to head northeast toward Arkansas later Saturday, but stubbornly remained a strong Category 2 storm.

Maximum winds decreased slightly to 100 mph, but the storm likely won't be downgraded until later in the day. It was about 15 miles east-northeast of Houston Intercontinental Airport.

It made landfall just after 3 a.m. EDT, carrying winds of 110 mph and lashing the coastal city of Galveston. Officials won't know the extent of damage until they can safely survey the battered landscape.

As Ike careened toward Galveston Island late Friday, as many as 20,000 residents shunned orders to evacuate. Other residents stayed behind in the vulnerable coastal towns of Freeport and Surfside Beach.

Rapidly rising waters swamped roads and cut off escape routes for thousands, emergency officials said. Federal, state and local officials employed search-and-rescue teams, boats and helicopters to pluck the first trapped residents.

Power was knocked out to hundreds of thousands of customers in Louisiana and along the Texas coast. That number that was expected to climb quickly throughout the night, according to Centerpoint Energy, the primary electricity provider for the region.

Galveston fire crews rescued more than 300 people who were walking through flooded streets on Friday, clutching clothes and other belongings as they tried to wade to safety.

Matt White, a 48-year-old nurse, was caught by rising waters as he tried to evacuate his home on the Bolivar Peninsula. Waves crashed over the sand dunes at around 9 a.m., sweeping his Dodge truck sideways and flipping other vehicles on the road. Two men and three children swam to his truck as the waters rose. A Coast Guard helicopter rescued them from the roof of the truck a little more than an hour later.

"The whole town's under water," said Mr. White, speaking by cellphone from Gulf Greyhound Park, a racetrack south of Houston where rescue helicopters were landing.

Insurance companies are girding for losses in Texas that could far exceed the $2 billion that Hurricane Rita cost them in 2005 and might approach the $41 billion caused by Hurricane Katrina.

A preliminary estimate predicted insured damages of between $10 billion and $20 billion, with losses split equally between individuals and companies, according to Eqecat, which uses computer models to calculate exposure for insurance companies.

Many residents stayed put in their ramshackle coastal bungalows despite warnings from the National Weather Service that stragglers would face "certain death."

Officials were growing increasingly worried about the stalwarts, and many communities imposed curfews to discourage looters. Authorities in three counties alone said roughly 90,000 stayed behind, despite a warning from forecasters that many of those in one- or two-story homes on the coast faced "certain death."

With heavy bands of rain and high winds moving in, rescue crews were forced to retreat and leave the stubborn to fend for themselves. Firefighters left a boat and yacht warehouse in Galveston in flames because water was too high for fire trucks to navigate.

Texas officials evacuated about 1.2 million coastal residents ahead of Ike's landfall. But leaders of the Houston area, the nation's sixth-largest metropolitan region, took a calculated gamble and told more than four million people further inland to remain and "hunker down" instead.

Their decision was shaped by Houston's chaotic evacuation before Hurricane Rita in 2005. Traffic gridlock led to the deaths of 120 people, most on roads before the storm arrived. Some were stuck in cars as long as 18 hours. At the last moment, Rita veered away from the region.

U.S. Coast Guard and Air Force rescue crews were forced to abort an effort to rescue 22 crew members stranded aboard a 584-foot freighter that lost power and was adrift in the path of the storm off Galveston Friday. A rescue jet had to turn back when it encountered 92 mph winds and 20-foot seas. The Coast Guard was staying in touch by radio with the ship, which was transporting petroleum coke used to fuel steel plants, but "they're basically drifting out there," said Petty Officer Nathan Henise.

Forecasters said Hurricane Ike would bring hurricane-force winds and rain as heavy as five inches an hour to Houston. Officials worried the downpour would overwhelm the city's flood-prone bayous. Flooding also threatens the Houston Ship Channel, which is lined with petrochemical refineries and carries large ships from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of Houston. The port moved 200 million tons of cargo in 2006 and is among the nation's busiest.

Gulf Coast wholesale gasoline prices jumped to nearly $5 a gallon over fears that water and wind damage could keep the facilities closed for days or longer.

In Houston, long lines of cars snaked around gasoline stations. Supermarkets and big-box home-repair stores filled with shoppers buying water and plywood. Some said they would have left if they had been warned earlier. Officials in Harris County, which includes Houston, didn't call for evacuations until Thursday.

"Houston always reacts a bit late," said Jose Solis, 36, a hospital executive, as he waited in line to fill up his car. The Mexico City native said he would have preferred to fly to Mexico with his family if he had been warned sooner.

Spec's, a warehouse retailer of beer and spirits, was doing brisk business in the hours before the storm, as Houstonians prepared to be locked inside without Friday night high-school football or electronic entertainment. Federal officials estimated that seven million people would be without electricity during Saturday's storm.

"You lose power. You lose AC. There's nothing to do but stare at each other. And you can't do that unless you're half drunk," said Tom Hobbs, 24, clutching a bottle of whisky in one hand and a case of beer in the other.

Floyd LeBlanc, a spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, the primary electricity provider for the region, said 1.3 million customers -- or about 2.9 million people -- in the Houston area had lost power by the time the storm made landfall at Galveston. Suppliers warned it could be weeks before all the service was restored.

Galveston was the site of the nation's most deadly storm disaster. An estimated 8,000 people, or about a fifth of the population, died in 1900 after a Category 4 hurricane struck with a 15-foot storm surge that washed over the entire island. Galveston, a wealthy seaport that was far more important than Houston at the time, never fully regained its prominence.

Sand was dredged to raise the island's east end by more than a foot and workers built a seawall that protects most of the city. The west end, which lies inches above sea level, has enjoyed a vacation-house boom in the past decade despite warnings that a hurricane would wash them away.

The last major storm to strike Galveston, Hurricane Alicia, caused $2.6 billion in damage in 1983 and killed 21 people.