September 12, 2008	Friday	Ramazan 11, 1429

HOUSTON (Texas), Sept 11: Roads and bridges leading away from the Texas coast were jammed on Thursday as hundreds of thousands of residents of Houston and surrounding areas began a mass evacuation on Thursday, with deadly Hurricane Ike bearing down on the Texas metropolis.

Oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico was largely shut off, the US Department of Energy said in Washington, and the US space agency said it was closing its Johnson Space Center in Houston “until the threat of Hurricane Ike has passed.”Authorities in Harris County, the jurisdiction Houston falls within, said evacuations of the city’s most flood-prone areas -- home to about a quarter million residents -- began at 1700 GMT.

The evacuations would commence with the elderly, infirm and other residents with special needs. Houston officials planned to re-route highway traffic and said fuelling stations would be placed on major roads to facilitate the exodus.

Ike, which has left more than 100 dead across the Caribbean, could slam into the Texas coast immediately south of the port of Galveston late Friday or early Saturday, the National Hurricane Center forecast.

Houston, just inland from Galveston and on track to feel some of Ike’s wrath, is home to 2.2 million people, and its metropolitan area is the country’s sixth largest, topping 5.6 million.

“We didn’t expect it to be coming this close to us,” said Joe Steinebaker, a county court spokesman.

He said Ike could create a 15-foot storm surge in Galveston Bay, which could prove “calamitous” to some communities along the bay.

“We want those folks out,” he said.

But some residents resisted the order to clear out.

“Unless it’s really bad, we don’t want to go anywhere,” said Galveston resident Leslie LeGrande.

Her neighbour Celia Padnos said she was banking on Ike making a last-minute detour, as did Hurricane Rita in 2005 -- a year when she did evacuate, for, as it turned out, no reason.

“I hate driving and I ended up driving for 14 hours to Austin,” normally just a four hour drive, she said.

At 1500 GMT the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said a hurricane warning had been issued for the US Gulf Coast, encompassing Texas and Louisiana.

The storm, with maximum sustained winds of around 160 kilometres per hour, was located about 760 kilometres east-southeast of Galveston and was moving west-northwest at about 17 kilometres per hour.

Forecasters warned that the sprawling storm could gain force before it crashes into the coast near Houston, the key US oil hub and major space centre.

—AFP