Hurricane Ike brings life to a standstill in Houston
As the Hurricane Ike moves inland over Missouri and Illinois today prompting flood warnings, the lives of over two million people have come to a standstill.
Though, the storm weakened to a tropical depression as it came ashore on Galveston Island, the local authorities said they will take some time to get electricity restored in all the affected areas, said Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for Entergy Texas, the primary electricity provider between Houston and the Louisiana border.
Giant hurricane Ike has left Houston without Internet, phone lines, drinking water and severed power to millions after ripping through the fourth-largest city yesterday,
Rodgers said damage to the electric grid was much more widespread than after Hurricane Rita, which hit the area in 2005.
Ike, the first hurricane to hit a major US metropolitan area since Katrina in 2005, has affected 2.3 million people in two states before making landfall at 2.10 am on Saturday.
With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers here, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows leaving the Houston and its coastal areas in debris.
In Orange, Tex, near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.
There were reports of as many as four people killed, but it could take days to search flooded homes to assess the full impact of the storm, officials said.
Source: Business Standard