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Texas Evacuates 2,000 From Battered Coast

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The New York Times

Published: September 15, 2008

HOUSTON - State officials mounted the largest rescue operation in Texas history on Sunday, taking nearly 2,000 people by boat and helicopter out of flood-ravaged towns on the Texas coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

At the same time, millions of others coped without electricity and faced shortages of food, water and gasoline.

Rescue workers expressed fears, however, that more bodies were still to be found in unexplored areas swamped by the hurricane's storm surge, including the Bolivar Peninsula, a spit of land just east of Galveston, where the storm surge was at its most intense and many houses were reduced to rubble.

Local officials said rescuers had been unable to get to at least several dozen people who had escaped floodwaters by claiming precarious perches on rooftops and water tanks in the peninsula since Friday. One man was washed from his home on Crystal Beach on the peninsula all the way to the mainland, where he was spotted by National Guard troops in a helicopter and picked up.

Leaders in the hardest-hit communities along the coast and on Galveston Bay - increasingly desperate at the lack of basic supplies and utilities - warned it could be weeks before the 1.2 million residents who fled inland could return home.

In Galveston, City Manager Steve LeBlanc said rescue workers had so far discovered three bodies in the flood that inundated downtown, and that the toll may rise.

"We are searching every structure from one end of the island to the other," he said.

All along the coast were scenes of destruction: houses flattened, piers destroyed, boats tossed ashore, debris and rubble covering highways. Insurance companies and the state of Texas could be liable for up to $16 billion in damages, by some industry estimates.

Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city and the center of its oil and gas industry, remained largely paralyzed by the storm. The downtown business district, its skyscrapers tattered by the winds, remained shuttered until further notice. City authorities warned residents to boil water, for fear of contamination.

But a pernicious kind of damage, with deadly potential, was harder to see, officials said. The region was facing a common secondary health emergency seen after storms when there is no power, no water and no functioning sewers. Officials begged residents in shelters in Austin and scattered across Texas not to return to Galveston or other hard-hit areas.

Meanwhile, oil industry officials began tallying the toll on the nation's strategic energy facilities. At least 10 offshore oil platforms were destroyed in the storm, officials said, and the Houston-area oil refineries that produce 20 percent of the nation's gas remained shuttered and offline.

It was unclear how soon they would be brought back into production - and how big the impact would be on the nation's gasoline supplies - but prices at the pump soared to $5 a gallon in some cities.

As frustrated Houston residents began searching for scarce gasoline, food and clean water, both Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democratic Houston Mayor Bill White questioned whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency was devoting enough resources to delivering supplies to the region and helping restore power to the nearly 5 million people languishing without it.

Officials of the three private utility companies that supply electricity to the Houston metropolitan region said it could take them a month to restore power to everyone, a potentially debilitating delay to the area's economy, which supplies energy, aerospace and medical services to the nation.

"The future of America depends on a state like Texas and a city like Houston to get back on its feet as soon as it can," Perry said at a news conference in Galveston. "That is the reason we are going to be adamant in our requests for federal help to get the power back on. Not only is it the right thing to do for your citizens, it's the right thing to do for your country."

White asked FEMA officials why they had not begun to deliver food, water and ice supplies to 24 pre-established distribution points throughout Houston, considering that loaded trucks had been positioned in advance of the storm a few hundred miles away.

"We expect FEMA to deliver those supplies and we will hold them accountable in this community." White said.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said it remained unclear when FEMA would be able to begin distributing the aid.

Information from McClatchy-Tribune and The Associated Press was used in this report.

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