Hurricane Damage Is Extensive in Texas

HOUSTON — Hurricane Ike barreled across a wide swath of Texas on Saturday, deluging the city of Galveston with a wall of water, flooding coastal towns and leaving extensive damage across metropolitan Houston.

With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers here, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows, sending shattered glass and debris across the nation’s fourth-largest city, with a population of 2.2 million.

The storm came ashore on Galveston Island, which in 1900 suffered one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States. Winds covered the main highway with a layer of boats and debris, shutting it down. In Orange, Tex., near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.

(Article continues below)

Yet officials expressed relief that the damage was not as catastrophic as federal and state officials had warned it would be.

“Fortunately the worst-case scenario did not occur,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said at a news conference on Saturday. “The good news is the surge was not as big as we thought it would be.”

Full article here