Ms. Thomas added: “Galveston has been hit hard. We have no power. We have no gas. We have no communications. We’re not sure when any of that will be up and running.”

The air was becoming foul-smelling and was swarming with mosquitoes. Sewage was beginning to back up onto waterlogged streets. The lack of running water was becoming a health hazard; without the water, people could not flush toilets or properly wash their hands.

Small packs of stray dogs roamed the streets. Helicopters buzzed overhead on search and rescue missions. Debris from ruined buildings lined the broad boulevard along the Gulf of Mexico. A line of about 60 cars snaked around piles of wood, slabs of concrete and fallen awnings, their drivers waiting for the Coast Guard to give out food, water and tarps.

Along the road to the island’s flooded west end, longhorn steers grazed in the median strip near scattered recreational boats and a shiny late-model Corvette with water inside. Refrigerators and trash bins lay in the front yards of several homes, and some of the area’s most expensive houses were reduced to rubble. Forty buildings in all had collapsed.

In Jamaica Beach, west of Galveston, six houses were destroyed and most of the others damaged, said a police official, Steve Hubbell. He warned residents that snakes were slithering through debris and that nails in roadways were flattening tires.

I will go anywhere but here,” Shannika Jones said as she stood at the shelter with her sons, both under age 2, in a line to board a bus. “My babies are getting sick.” Behind her were two rows of chairs filled with elderly people, some with open wounds.

“Next time they should warn people about this, not the storm itself,” Ms. Jones said.

This is classic. They put out a "mandatory evacuation" and Ms. Jones stays put. They put out a warning that says "anybody that stays faces certain death" and she stays put.

WTF?

He also noted that phone repair crews from AT&T were sitting idled at the staging center because they had run out of fuel for their trucks.

Thousands of cars snaked their way toward a furniture store parking lot south of downtown, awaiting a share of 9 tons of ice and 50,000 gallons of bottled water that a radio station was giving away. Most in line waited nearly two hours, meaning they had to burn scarce gasoline to get scarce ice and water.

Was it reverse engineer muttering earlier about needing tanker convoys to get anywhere?

its absolutely mind boggling to me, give the destruction of property and people who stayed behind, that there are only a handful of deaths. How lucky

Do you really believe that there were only a "handful" of deaths? The entire west end of Galveston Island is gone. Entire bayside communities are flat. Houstonians were told to hunker down. Many people stayed in other communities despite mandatory evacuations.... I find it hard to believe that only a handful of people died. I just think it's not being reported...
K

Actually it is being reported and I would have to agree that it's remarkable the loss of life was so low.

Out of power and 'unsafe,' Galveston starts long clean-up

Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Texas refiners and Gulf of Mexico oil and gas producers may need two weeks to restore normal operations after Hurricane Ike swept through the region.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest oil company, said its Beaumont, Texas, refinery took the ``most serious hit'' of its plants, from a wall of water pushed ashore by Ike. Royal Dutch Shell Plc restarted ``some production'' in the east of the Gulf of Mexico as a cold front hindered efforts to restore output at other facilities.

``You are looking at 10 to 14 days for most of the refineries'' in the Houston and Texas City areas, Andy Lipow, president of Houston-based Lipow Oil Associates LLC, said in a telephone interview. ``Power and people are the major stumbling blocks for refineries to return.''

Fourteen Texas and Louisiana refineries, with combined crude processing capacity of 3.72 million barrels a day, were closed because of Ike. The storm came ashore near Galveston Sept. 13, shutting about 20 percent of the U.S.'s oil-refining capacity.

``It's highly unlikely that we will see the bulk of these operations back to normal before a minimum of 10 days to two weeks,'' Tom Knight, trading director at Truman Arnold Cos., an independent wholesaler in Texarkana, Texas, said in an interview.

Refinery outages are expected to reduce supply and boost gasoline prices. Regular gasoline at the pump rose 4.8 percent to $3.842 a gallon on Sept. 14 from a week ago, AAA, the nation's biggest motoring club, said on its Web site.

``Over the next two weeks the national average could get as high as $3.90 to $3.95 and then come back off,'' said Lipow.

Was it reverse engineer muttering earlier about needing tanker convoys to get anywhere?