Texans endure sleepless night as Ike roars ashore

A massive Hurricane Ike menaced the darkened Texas coast early Saturday, ensuring a sleepless night for thousands who huddled and waited to find out if a gamble to face the storm head-on could cost them their lives.Before the eye even crossed land, the first bands were punishing. Wind-whipped waves surged over a 17-foot seawall in Galveston and filled streets with waist-high water. Homes were flooding, and utilities said 850,000 customers — more than 4.5 million people — were without power. There also was fear hurricane-force winds could shatter the windows of the sparkling skyscrapers that define the skyline of America's fourth-largest city.

Rescue crews worried daybreak would bring a nightmare scenario: Thousands who defied evacuation orders and became trapped in submerged communities. Already, dozens of calls had come into 911 dispatchers begging for help.

"We don't know what we are going to find. We hope we will find the people who are left here alive and well," Galveston Mayor Lynda Ann Thomas said. "We are keeping our fingers crossed all the people who stayed on Galveston Island managed to survive this."

The storm began battering the coast Friday afternoon, and the eye was likely to cross early Saturday morning. As of 1 a.m. EDT, Ike was centered about 35 miles southeast of Galveston, moving at 12 mph. It was close to a Category 3 storm with winds of 110 mph. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore somewhere near Galveston and pass almost directly over Houston.

Though 1 million people fled coastal communities near where the storm was projected to make landfall, authorities in three counties alone said roughly 90,000 stayed behind. As the front of the storm moved into Galveston, fire crews rescued nearly 300 people who changed their minds and fled at the last minute, wading through floodwaters carrying clothes and other posessions.

"The unfortunate truth is we're going to have to go in tomorrow and put our people in the tough situation to save people who did not choose wisely. We'll probably do the largest search and rescue operation that's ever been conducted in the state of Texas," said Andrew Barlow, spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry.

In Houston, some low-lying communities that were ordered evacuated flooded, but because the storm struck overnight, officials had no idea how bad the damage was. Storm surge was pushing into a neighborhood near Johnson Space Center where Houston Mayor Bill White had made rounds earlier with a bullhorn trying to compel people to leave. Thousands of homes could be damaged, a spokesman for the mayor said, but it was too dangerous to go out and canvass the neighborhood at the height of the storm.

In a move designed to avoid highway gridlock, most of Houston's 2 million residents heeded orders to hunker down at home. On the far east side of Houston, Claudia Macias was awake with her newborn and was trying unsuccessfully not to think about the trees swaying outside her doors, or the wind vibrating through her windows. She had been through other storms, but this time was different because she was a new mother.

"I don't know who's going to sleep here tonight, maybe the baby," said Macias, 34.

At 600 miles across, the storm was nearly as big as Texas itself, and threatened to give the state its worst pounding in a generation. Because of the hurricane's size, the state's shallow coastal waters and its largely unprotected coastline, forecasters said the biggest threat would be flooding and storm surge, with Ike expected to hurl a wall of water two stories high — 20 to 25 feet — at the coast.