Hurricane Ike gets ready to strike

Ike's giant girth means more water piling up on Texas and Louisiana coastal areas for a longer time, topped with bigger waves. So storm surge -- the prime killer in hurricanes -- will be far worse than a typical storm of Ike's strength, the National Hurricane Center said.

And because coastal waters in Texas and Louisiana are so shallow, storm surge is usually larger there than in other regions, according to storm experts. A 1900 hurricane following a similar track to Ike inundated Galveston Island, killing at least 8,000 people -- America's deadliest storm.

"It's a good recipe for surge," said Benton McGee, supervisory hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's storm surge center in Ruston, La. "We're already seeing water being piled up in the Gulf. On top of that you're going to have water forced into the bays along the coast."

The National Hurricane Center is forecasting a 20-foot surge -- a rapid rising of water inundating areas and moving inland -- for a large swath of Texas and the Louisiana coasts. Above that, the center predicts "large and dangerous battering waves." Waves could be 50 feet tall, said hurricane center spokesman and meteorologist Dennis Feltgen.

Some computer models have waves topping out at 70 feet, but the waves usually break well before hitting shore, so the maximum usually doesn't get quite that high.

Geography doesn't help either. Experts say the Texas coast ranks second, behind Louisiana, as the worst region for storm surge in the United States. That's because the water there is shallower than in most other regions. The energy from a hurricane needs a way to escape. Deeper water can absorb more of it, dissipating the surge, but along the Texas coastline, the water has nowhere to go but up on shore, McGee said. Think of the Gulf of Mexico as a shallow bathtub with a big-time disturbance in it, Mayfield said.

“Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death,” the National Weather Service said in a local bulletin at 8:19 p.m. “Many residences of average construction directly on the coast will be destroyed.”

The dire warning came at the end of a long day of anxiety in Houston and Galveston, as it appeared likely that Hurricane Ike would roll over the two cities. People rushed to board up their houses and move inland as the unusually wide storm, which was more than 500 miles across with 100 mile per hour winds at its center, churned across the Gulf of Mexico.

The authorities ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate low-lying areas from the Louisiana border to Corpus Christi. Traffic built up on highways leading from the coast; some gas stations ran out of fuel.

“I cannot overemphasize the danger that is facing us,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said at a news conference in Austin.

In the storm’s path lies one of the nation’s largest concentration of oil refineries, the Johnson Space Center, the resorts on Galveston Island and Houston’s downtown of skyscrapers. More than four million people live in Houston and its suburbs.

The federal government moved swiftly to send rescue teams, generators, water and food into Texas and Louisiana, said Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security. Forty teams with helicopters and high-water trucks from the Coast Guard, the National Guard and the Defense Department were positioned to rescue people, Mr. Chertoff said.

Authorities are expressing amazement at the level of storm surge that is already hitting the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Ike.  Galveston Island is experiencing a 5 - 7 foot surge with an estimated 15 feet of additional storm surge expected at landfall in over 12 hours.  They just reported that in addition to the 20 feet of total storm surge expected based on what they are seeing already hitting the coast they believe there will be 20 feet of high waves on TOP of the storm surge.