Ike is 'The Big One' for 2008

Texas Governor Rick Perry described Ike on CNN as "a monster of a storm," and compared the storm surge Ike will generate -- high enough to engulf a two-story home -- to a tsunami.

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, the fourth largest US city with a metropolitan area population topping 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 80-billion dollar and 100-billion-dollar range."

"With Houston being home to some of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world, there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure there," Colley said.

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison also warned of the storm's economic consequences, saying "it's not just a regular rain and wind hurricane."

"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. - AFP

clipped from afp.google.com Ike, a sprawling system the size of Texas itself, was packing winds of 175 kilometers (110 miles) an hour, just shy of becoming a powerful Category Three storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, the National Hurricane Center reported. In Galveston , the power went out across the island just before 0100 GMT Saturday, plunging the storm-stricken city into darkness. "Expect the unexpected," said city manager Steve Le Blanc. "The worst is yet to come." Despite the dire warnings, only 38,000 of Galveston island's 58,000 residents evacuated, Mary Jo Naschke, who works in the city's mayor's office, told AFP. 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.