Officials urge residents to flee as hurricane roars to Texas

GALVESTON, Texas - Officials begged thousands of diehard residents of the Texas coast to flee "certain death" as Hurricane Ike on Friday raged towards Houston, the fourth largest US city and a major oil hub.

Huge waves were smashing over the sea wall in Galveston as the center of the storm at 2100 GMT was some 220 kilometers (135 miles) offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Ike was packing winds of near 165 kilometers (105 miles) per hour, with higher gusts.

Texas Governor Rick Perry described Ike as "a monster of a storm," and urged the holdouts still in the coastal area -- including some 14,500 believed to be on the barrier island of Galveston -- to leave.

"Get out of harm's way and live another day," Perry said on Fox News. "Individuals who think they are tougher, stronger than Mother Nature -- God be with them."

Perry compared the massive storm surge Ike will generate -- high enough to engulf a two-story home -- to a tsunami. "A tsunami is what you're looking at," he said.

"This is a monster storm in terms of the flooding potential," added Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, also interviewed on CNN. The storm surge "is going to inundate large parts of the Texas coast," he said.

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

Houston, the fourth largest US city with a metropolitan area population topping five million people, is just a few miles from the bay and is also forecast to be hammered hard.

Ike was expected to plow onto land late Friday or early Saturday, with a direct hit on Galveston and Houston, the Miami-based National Hurricane centre said.

"Ike is a Category Two hurricane on the (five-scale) Saffir-Simpson scale, but could reach the coast as a Category Three major hurricane," the centre warned.

The storm "remains a very large hurricane," with hurricane-force winds extending up to 195 kilometres (120 miles) from the centre, and strong tropical force storm winds extending up to 445 kilometres (275 miles) from the centre.

Hundreds of thousands fled low-lying areas on Galveston island and the coastal Houston metropolitan area, after the Hurricane Centre issued apocalyptic warnings of "certain death" if residents stayed behind.

"It's not just a regular rain and wind hurricane," warned Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, interviewed on Fox.

"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."

Despite the dire warnings, some 14,500 of Galveston island's 58,000 residents have not evacuated, Mary Jo Naschke, who works in Galveston City's mayor's office, told AFP.

"All neighborhoods and possibly entire coastal communities will be inundated during the period of peak storm tide," the centre said, referring to land along Galveston Bay, which reaches 25 miles (40 kilometres) inland from its namesake barrier island to the heart of Houston.

"Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family, one- or two-story homes will face certain death."

Chocolate-coloured seawater began to flood the streets of Galveston Friday as the storm surge intensified.

"If you're in one of these surge zones, you need to be leaving right now," Frank Michel of the Houston mayor's office said. For those refusing to leave, he urged people living on higher ground to board up their windows and stock up on supplies, as Ike's strong winds could cause power cuts lasting several days.

Around 5.6 million people live in the Houston metropolitan region, which stretches down to the Texas coast.

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.

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.

In New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Army Corps of Engineers closed the gates at 17th Street canal as the surge from Ike pushed water past the critical five-feet (1.60 meters) mark.

The water will be pumped into a nearby lake to keep the canal water at a safe level.

Meanwhile US Coast Guard rescuers headed into the Gulf of Mexico to try to reach 22 people stranded aboard a Cyprus-flagged freighter that lost power as it tried to steam out of Ike's way.