Ike leaves Gulf Coast underwater

OVER THE GULF COAST | Entire swaths of land from southern Louisiana to Gilchrist, Texas, have been flooded or destroyed by Hurricane Ike, which swept through the area early Saturday morning.

“There was devastating beach flooding from Galveston north to Port Arthur,” said Tim Hackett, an air interdetection agent of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection´s Air and Marine division.

The division flew a second flight in its P3 Orion long-range tracker over the Gulf region Sunday to record video and high-resolution photos of the hurricane damage for federal agencies. The Washington Times went along for the flight.

“You can definitely see a lot of destruction,” said Timothy Flynn, detection enforcement officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine division as he took video of the damage.

A portion of land north of Galveston, Texas, was “wiped clear” by the hurricane’s eye. Streets once filled with houses were emptied out by the storm, leaving just foundations.

The flooding appeared most severe in the Lake Charles area of Louisiana. A few houses built on stilts dotted the landscape. Although those complexes appear to have made out with less flooding than its neighbors, all roads leading to them were completely flooded.

Some oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have sustained some minor damage, according to the CBP. Long oil slicks were spotted along the Texas-Louisiana coast.

The Galveston airport was flooded Saturday and was partially underwater Sunday. Two major roads into the island were either flooded or destroyed.

Meanwhile on Sunday, rescuers said that they had saved nearly 2,000 people from the waterlogged streets and splintered houses left behind by Ike. Glass-strewn Houston was placed under a weeklong curfew, and millions of people in the storm’s path remained in the dark.

As the floodwaters began to recede from the first hurricane to make a direct hit on a major U.S. city since Katrina, authorities planned to go door to door into the night to reach an untold number of people across the Texas coast who rode out the storm and were still in their homes.

Many of those who did make it to safety boarded buses without knowing where they would end up and without knowing when they could return to what was left of their homes, if anything.

“I don’t know what I’ll be coming back to. I have nothing,” said Arma Eaglin, 52, who was waiting for a bus to a shelter in San Antonio after leaving her home and wading through chest-deep water.

The hurricane also battered the heart of the U.S. oil industry: Federal officials said Ike destroyed a number of production platforms, although it was too soon to know how seriously oil and gas prices would be affected.

Ike was downgraded to a tropical depression as it moved into the nation’s midsection and left more harm in its wake. Roads were closed in Kentucky because of high winds. As far north as Chicago, dozens of people in a suburb had to be evacuated by boat. Two million people were without power in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The death toll from the storm rose to 25. Five were in the hard-hit barrier island city of Galveston, including one body found in a vehicle submerged in floodwater at the airport.

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