Crews fan out in Texas to search for Ike victims

HOUSTON - Hurricane Ike weakened to a tropical depression as it headed across western Arkansas Sunday, after making landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast as a Category 2 hurricane, paralyzing Houston and flooding Galveston and other coastal areas.

Rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-water trucks set out across the flood-stricken Texas coast on Saturday in a monumental effort to reach tens of thousands of people who stubbornly ignored warnings of "certain death" and tried to ride out the storm.

The storm roared ashore hours before daybreak Saturday with 110-mph winds and towering waves, smashing houses, flooding thousands of homes, blowing out windows in Houston's skyscrapers, and cutting off power to more than 3 million people, perhaps for weeks.

By evening, it appeared that Ike was not the single calamitous stroke that forecasters had feared. But the full extent of the damage — or even a rough sense of how many people may have perished — was still unclear, in part because many roads were impassable.

Some authorities feared that this could instead become a slow-motion disaster, with thousands of victims trapped in their homes, waiting for days to be rescued.

"We will be doing this probably for the next week or more. We hope it doesn't turn into a recovery," said Sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Marlow in Orange County, where 600 to 700 people had to be rescued from flooded homes. He said hundreds were probably still stranded.

Many waited too long to leave
By some estimates, more than 140,000 of the 1 million or so people who had been ordered to evacuate the coast as Ike drew near may have tried to tough it out. Many of them evidently realized the mistake too late, and pleaded with authorities in vain to save them overnight.

Since Ike made landfall, there have been 940 rescues in Texas of people stranded in homes, vehicles and elsewhere, said Gov. Rick Perry's spokeswoman Allison Castle. In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal said nearly 600 people were plucked from Ike's floodwaters since Friday and that search and rescue teams believe the largest number of rescues was behind them.

At 1 a.m. CDT Sunday, Ike's center was 105 miles west-northwest of Little Rock, Arkansas, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm carried top sustained winds near 35 mph, and was moving north-northeast near 24 mph.

The center warned residents of Arkansas, northern Louisiana and southern Missouri that Ike was still dangerous and could unleash isolated tornadoes and dump from 3 to 8 inches of rain anywhere in a wide swath of the nation's midsection.

Ronnie Sharp, 65, and his terrier-mix Princess, had to be rescued from his trailer in Orange County when water reached his knees. "I was getting too many snakes in the house, otherwise I would have stayed," Sharp said. He said he lost everything in the flood but his medicine and some cigarettes.

After the storm had passed, National Guardsmen, members of the Coast Guard, FEMA representatives and state and local law enforcement authorities mobilized for what Gov. Rick Perry pronounced "the largest search-and-rescue operation in the history of the state of Texas."

Some emergency officials were angry and frustrated that so many people ignored the warnings.

"When you stay behind in the face of a warning, not only do you jeopardize yourself, you put the first responders at risk as well," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. "Now we're going to see this play out."

Steve LeBlanc, Galveston's city manager, said: "There was a mandatory evacuation, and people didn't leave, and that is very frustrating because now we are having to deal with everybody who did not heed the order. This is why we do it, and they had enough time to get out."

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