Hurricane Ike pounds Texas coast as thousands refuse to leave

GALVESTON, Texas - A gigantic hurricane roared onto the Texas Gulf coast early Saturday, driving a huge ocean surge over coastal areas where tens of thousands of people remained holed up in defiance of evacuation orders.

Ike, a powerful category two hurricane with winds raging at 175 kilometres per hour, was headed for a direct hit on Houston, the fourth largest US city and a major oil hub 70 kilometres inland from Galveston.

More than a million people fled inland in the hours before the Texas-size storm was due to make landfall between 0700 and 0800 GMT Saturday.

But officials said more than 100,000 residents of low-lying neighbourhoods decided to ride out the storm despite warnings from the national weather service that a wall of water up to 7.5 metres high could mean "certain death" to those who stayed behind.

Gargantuan waves smashed over a five meter seawall built to protect this island city as the centre of Ike was about 35 kilometres southeast of Galveston , moving at about 20 kilometres an hour, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center reported.

Ike was pushing ashore waves measuring as high as a two-story house, swamping Galveston while blistering winds raked Houston, home to a major US port and key refineries.

As Ike bore down on Texas, companies abandoned 13 refineries representing a combined capacity of 3.7 million barrels of crude oil per day - a fifth of US refinery capacity.

In Galveston, the power went out across the island just before 0100 GMT Saturday, plunging the storm-stricken city into darkness.

Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew starting Friday and ending Monday morning. Chocolate-colored seawater flooded the streets as the storm surge intensified throughout the day, spoiling the city's potable water system.

Two blazes broke out in the afternoon. Flames shot out of an unattended Galveston home near the oceanfront, while thick smoke from a ship repair warehouse darkened the sky over the city.

Firefighters, restricted by the high water, had to let the structures burn.

All neighbourhoods and possibly entire coastal communities along Galveston Bay, which reaches 40 kilometres inland from its namesake barrier island to the heart of Houston, "will be inundated during the period of peak storm tide," the National Hurricane Center said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described Ike's arrival as "potentially catastrophic."

"This is a monster storm in terms of the flooding potential," added Chertoff. The storm surge "is going to inundate large parts of the Texas coast."

Texas Governor Rick Perry described Ike on CNN as "a monster of a storm."

Referring to the holdouts that refused to flee the coastal area, he said on Fox News: "Individuals who think they are tougher, stronger than Mother Nature - God be with them."

Perry said some 1.2 million people had evacuated coastal Texas ahead of the storm.

Houston, whose metropolitan area population tops five million people, is just a few miles from the bay, and destruction there and along the coast in the hurricane zone is expected to be massive.

Jack Colley, from the Texas Department of Emergency Management, said officials estimated the storm's economic impact would be "somewhere in between the US$80-billion and US$100-billion range."

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison also warned of the storm's economic consequences.

"The economic impact is going to be huge. People are much more concerned about this one than I have seen in a long, long time," she said on Fox News.

Oil and gas production in the Gulf was largely shut off, though the US Department of Energy said Ike appeared likely to spare most rigs and platforms there.

President George W. Bush, a former Texas governor, said he was "deeply concerned" about the threat the storm posed to the region.

Galveston has faced calamity before. The deadliest hurricane in US history, the "Great Storm" of 1900, killed at least 8,000 people when it smashed into Galveston and Houston.

Ike has left more than 100 dead across the Caribbean and sparked hurricane and tropical storm warnings from Louisiana to Mexico.

Separately, US Coast Guard rescuers called off an attempt to rescue 22 sailors stranded aboard a Cyprus-flagged freighter that lost power in the Gulf of Mexico as it tried to steam out of Ike's way, but added they would seek to remain in radio contact with the crew.