Residents in one area of the Texas coastline have been warned they must evacuate before the arrival of Hurricane Ike or “face certain death”.
HOUSTON: Residents in one area of the Texas coastline have been warned they must evacuate before the arrival of Hurricane Ike or “face certain death”.
The National Weather Service issued the grave warning to those living in low-lying areas around Galveston Bay.
More than a million people in Texas have been advised to leave their homes before Ike hits late on Friday night. The storm has already killed more than 70 people in the Caribbean. President George W Bush has declared a federal emergency in Texas,
allowing funds to be freed to help the state deal with the storm.
Ike was about 415 kmph with winds above 160kmph. The hurricane’s predicted path will take it through Galveston and on to the US’s fourth largest city, Houston.
Forecasters warned that because of the size of the storm, the low-lying coastal areas could be hit by a 20ft high surge of water. “All neighbourhoods and possibly entire coastal communities will be inundated during the period of the peak storm tide,” the National Weather Service said in a statement. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one- or two-storey homes will face certain death.”
The warning was issued after it became apparent some residents in the Galveston Bay area were resisting orders to evacuate. “There’s more people here than I thought,” Alicia Cahill, a public information officer for Galveston .
The authorities have laid on 1,000 buses to facilitate the exodus. In Galveston, 75 buses are transporting residents to the state capital, Austin. Weak and hospital patients are being moved to San Antonio. All energy production in the Gulf of Mexico has been shut down as a precaution, but the department of energy said the storm was expected to miss most of the installations.
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