HOUSTON — 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 tonight 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.
Ike was steering almost directly for Houston, where gleaming skyscrapers, the nation's biggest refinery and NASA's Johnson Space Center lie in areas vulnerable to wind and floodwaters. Forecasters said the storm was likely to come ashore as a Category 3, with winds up to 130 mph.
But the storm was so big — literally almost the size of Texas — that it could inflict a punishing blow even in those areas that do not get a direct hit. Forecasters warned that because of its size and the states shallow coastal waters, Ike could produce a surge, or wall of water, 20 feet high and waves of perhaps 50 feet. It could also dump 10 inches or more of rain.
Read the full story at MiamiHerald.com.
