/ 11 September 2008

Hurricane Ike takes aim at Texas

Hurricane Ike gathered strength as it churned through the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters on Wednesday on a track that would skirt the heart of the United States offshore oil patch before slamming into the Texas coast on Saturday.

Ike grew to a category-two storm with 155km/h winds and could come ashore as a ferocious category-four storm on the five-step intensity scale with winds of 213km/h, the National Hurricane Centre said.

But the latest projections pointed Ike toward the middle of the Texas coast, skirting to the west of the main region for offshore production in the gulf, which provides a quarter of US oil and 15% of its natural gas.

At 3am GMT on Thursday, the hurricane centre said in its latest advisory Ike was 1 090km east of Brownsville, Texas, and was moving northwest at 11km/h.

New Orleans, still scarred by Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1 500 people and caused $80-billion in damage on the US Gulf Coast in 2005, appeared to be out of danger.

Texas officials ordered some residents in low-lying Matagorda and Brazoria counties to evacuate. Mandatory evacuations had been illegal in Texas but the state changed its laws after Hurricane Rita in 2005. So far evacuation totals are nowhere near the two million people who fled Louisiana coastal cities in the path of Hurricane Gustav.

Other residents were boarding up homes and businesses to prepare for hurricane-force winds that could arrive on Friday.

”Right now, we have people coming in and out,” said Steve Probert, who works at a hardware store in the resort community of Port Aransas, across the Laguna Madre from Corpus Christi. ”They’re buying everything we have under the sun.”

President George Bush declared a federal emergency for Texas, allowing some federal disaster assistance. — Reuters