(AP) Hurricane Ike’s winds and massive waves destroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and punctured pipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent: At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of Louisiana and Texas, according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
In the days before and after the deadly storm, companies and residents reported at least 448 releases of oil, gasoline and dozens of other substances into the air and water and onto the ground in Louisiana and Texas. The hardest hit places were industrial centers near Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, as well as oil production facilities off Louisiana’s coast, according to the AP’s analysis.
Residents of Galveston Island, Texas, were returning to their homes Wednesday, almost three weeks after Hurricane Ike devastated Texas’ Gulf Coast.
But living conditions will remain rough, city officials stressed at an afternoon news conference. Most residents will not have electricity for another month, City Manager Steve LeBlanc said.
“People need to assess their own personal situation,” he said. “If they can tolerate these conditions, then they’ll stay.”
The return started early, with the only major highway leading onto Galveston Island backed up with cars in the predawn hours. Headlights stretched for miles.
A fire is burning at Brennans Restaurant, a well known Texas Creole restaurant in downtown Houston.
The eye of hurricane Ike has powered onto land in Galveston, Texas, and the storm is punishing the shoreline with 110 mph winds.
Hurricane Ike remained a Category 2 hurricane with winds topping 100 mph, as it started moving away from Houston on Saturday morning. (Sept. 13)
GALVESTON, Texas — A massive Hurricane Ike sent white waves crashing over a seawall and tossed a disabled 584-foot freighter in rough water as it steamed toward Texas Friday, threatening to devastate coastal towns and batter America’s fourth-largest city.
Ike’s eye was forecast to strike somewhere near Galveston late Friday or early Saturday then head inland for Houston, but the sprawling weather system nearly as big as Texas was already buffeting the Gulf Coast and causing flooding in areas still recovering from Labor Day’s Hurricane Gustav.
As Hurricane Ike bears down on Galveston and Houston, two Texas hospitals are bracing for the storm.
“We’re at emergency status, only essential personnel remain at the hospital,” Marsha Canright, director of public relations at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, told FOXNews.com. “The neonatal babies are going to San Antonio by air. We stopped taking new patients on Monday. We just have very ill people at the hospital.”
The hospital, which had about 600 patients at the beginning of the week, is now down to about 450.
Canright said the hospital also housed 95 inmates from Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and they were evacuated to a facility in Tyler, which is north of Galveston.
(CNN) — Residents living in single-family homes in some parts of coastal Texas face “certain death” if they do not heed orders to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Ike’s arrival, the National Weather Service said Thursday night.
The unusually strong wording came in a weather advisory regarding storm surge along the shoreline of Galveston Bay, which could see maximum water levels of 15 to 22 feet, the agency said.
“All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities … will be inundated during the period of peak storm tide,” the advisory said. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”
(CBS/AP) Cars and trucks streamed inland and chemical companies buttoned up their plants Thursday as a gigantic Hurricane Ike took aim at the heart of the U.S. refining industry and threatened to send a wall of water crashing toward Houston.
Nearly 1 million people along the Texas coast were ordered to evacuate ahead of the storm, which was expected to strike late Friday or early Saturday. But in a calculated risk aimed at avoiding total gridlock, authorities told most people in the nation’s fourth-largest city to just hunker down.
Hurricane Ike took aim at Cuba today after leaving 20 people dead in Haiti, where the death toll from a succession of powerful storms in the past few weeks now tops 600.
Ike was downgraded today from a Category Four hurricane to a still potentially devastating Category Three, as Cuba evacuated hundreds of thousands in a frantic bid to evade the storm’s fury.
Officials in Haiti, meanwhile, continued aid operations in the flood-stricken town of Gonaives, which has borne the brunt of recent flooding and seen untold misery and destruction.
