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Houston: A weakened Hurricane Ike headed north on Sunday after slamming into the Texas coast, leaving flooded seaside towns, power outages and overall destruction in its wake.
Rescue workers attempted to aid close to 40,000 people who ignored calls to evacuate the area, as officials began assessing the damage.
Ike swamped the island city of Galveston and hammered Houston, shattering windows of skyscrapers, showering streets with glass and debris, and ripping through buildings.
"This hurricane has caused devastation across areas of Texas and Louisiana," said David Paulison, administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Ike had declined to a tropical depression by early Sunday as it moved across western Arkansas, heading north on a path expected to bring heavy rains over a broad area stretching to Canada.
The densely populated Texas coast near Houston was barrelled by the storm early on Saturday.
Ike brought with it a wall of water and ferocious winds and rain that flooded large areas along the Gulf of Mexico and paralysed the fourth-largest US city.
Ike, a massive hurricane that has idled more than a fifth of US oil production, came ashore at the barrier island city of Galveston as a strong category two storm at 2:10am (11.10am Dubai) with 175kph winds, the National Hurricane Centre said.
The raging storm drove a wall of water that flooded Galveston and submerged a 5-metre sea wall built to protect the city after a 1900 hurricane killed at least 8,000 people. More than half its 60,000 residents had fled.
Grandmother Sherry Gill spent the night in League City, roughly halfway between Galveston and Houston, despite an evacuation order, huddling with her family and listening to the wind howling over her shuttered home.
"It was a night of sheer terror. I thought the roof was going to lift off," she said.
Streets impassable
About 80 kilometres inland, Ike lashed Houston's downtown skyscrapers, blowing out windows and sending debris flying through the water-logged streets. Downed trees and power lines and rising waters left many streets impassable.
Both of the former Enron towers, now occupied by Chevron Corp, were pocked with broken windows. There were also reports that the 75-story Chase Tower has numerous windows broken.
Ike was the biggest storm to hit a US city since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. It was downgraded to a category one on the hurricane intensity scale at 8am CDT, carrying top-sustained winds near 145kph and moving north, but officials said it was too soon to assess the extent damage.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett told reporters the winds had not been "extraordinarily high, certainly for a hurricane."
The main concern was the storm surge zone, the area affected by the wall of water pushed inland, and what had happened to coastal residents.
Hurricane force winds were expected to rip through Houston until around midday and tropical storm strength winds to continue for hours after that.
Houston is home to 2.2 million people, and its metropolitan area has about 5.6 million.
"We expected a major storm and our expectations unfortunately came true," said Mark Miner, a spokesman for Texas Governor Rick Perry. "The weather needs to clear up a little bit to see just what the devastation was."
In Galveston, emergency officials were sending patrols onto water-logged streets to begin assessing damage.
"We do have reports of damage but we're just now to the point where it is safe for our units to get out and start making assessments," Galveston County Emergency Management operations manager Lee Lockwood said.
Oil refineries hit
The hurricane shut down more than a dozen oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the heart of the US oil industry, where 22 per cent of fuel supplies are processed. Energy experts said they expected some would sustain damage from flooding, leaving them shut for several weeks.
Houston was dark yesterday morning, except for downtown and the Texas Medical Centre, which are fed by underground power sources, Floyd LeBlanc of CenterPoint Energy said.
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