Houston inconvenienced, but not devastated

Jeannine Burks stood outside her Houston home Sunday and surveyed the damage from Hurricane Ike: Tree limbs, debris and standing water everywhere. She had no power, no phones, and had only just back got her water pressure.

In other words, she got lucky.

"I have a roof over my house. I've got windows, and a cool front coming tomorrow," said Burks, who lives in the city's Sharpstown neighborhood. "Anytime you go through one of these with just broken trees and no power, you're doing good."

Some in America's fourth-largest city fared worse, others better, but the consensus among residents was that Houston, unlike its hard-hit coastal suburbs, was more inconvenienced than devastated.

This fast-paced metropolis churns on industries like oil, medical research and space technology. To be sure, commerce was dragged to a halt by Ike, and many companies announced plans to stay closed until further notice while cleanup efforts continue.

More than 80 percent of homes and business were still without power Sunday. Courts, schools and many gas stations would be closed heading into the workweek, while the airports planned to resume service on Monday. Interstate 10, the main east-west freeway, was still largely inundated and impassable, as were many side streets.

Officials imposed a weeklong, 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew to keep people off the streets and prevent looting.

Mike Espinoza, 29, and his girlfriend rode out the storm at her house in Sharpstown. He said it sounded like the roof was going to come off during the storm. As a new downpour fell on the city early Sunday, they patched part of it with Plexiglas.

Espinoza still hadn't seen his own home on the city's east side.

"From what I hear, my house took major damage to the roof from a fallen tree," he said.

Houston is headquarters of America's energy industry and home to the world's largest medical complex. As Gov. Rick Perry put it, the city of 2 million is the heart of the state's economy.

Long lines formed at hardware stores and gas stations as residents tried to get back on their feet.

When a tanker truck arrived at an Exxon Mobil station west of downtown Sunday evening, cars immediately started lining up around the corner. Within minutes, traffic was clogged. Tempers flared, horns honked and babies wailed

"It's very frustrating, very inconvenient," said Knox Green, who got out of his car to scream at a driver who was filling up a portable gas can and was parked at angle preventing others from getting around him.

"I understand why we can't get gas," he said, "but that doesn't make it any less frustrating."

At the behest of civic leaders, many Houstonians rode out the storm at home. Only the lowest-lying neighborhoods were evacuated. Officials did not want to risk a repeat of 2005's Hurricane Rita, when residents heeded orders to flee, only to become snarled in harrowing traffic jams. Many more people were killed on the roads during that storm than by the storm itself.

Ike was the first hurricane to make a direct hit on Houston since Alicia in 1983, but there have been others.

Houston was, after all, born of a hurricane.

The great Galveston storm of 1900, which remains America's deadliest natural disaster, nearly wiped the then-powerhouse port city on the Gulf of Mexico off the map.

Afterward, two enterprising brothers saw an opportunity and dredged the Houston Ship Channel, stealing Galveston's economic importance and creating the Port of Houston. The region's center of commerce moved 50 miles inland, atop what was once useless swampland and rice paddies.

Downtown and the Texas Medical Center have underground power lines, so electricity remained on in the heart of Houston, and the hospital's thousands of patients and millions of dollars worth of medical research were not in danger.

Houston is accustomed to high water on streets. It's a low, flat city of concrete built on clay soil beribboned with seven bayous that frequently overflow their banks. A strong thunderstorm causes high water on the streets, and the annual tropical storms cause almost as much street flooding as the city saw when Ike crashed ashore early Saturday about 40 miles south of Houston.

But Ike's aftermath broke other headaches.

A radio giveaway of free ice and water caused massive highway gridlock as people waited for hours in cars to get to the truckloads of supplies.

Construction worker Henry Mendoza, 39, planned to spend the night on a lounge chair in the back of his pickup truck rather than in a dark house with no air conditioning.

"It's tough for us inside; it's tough for us outside," said Mendoza.

Some major corporations were keeping their offices closed Monday. Several skyscrapers - including the JPMorgan Chase tower, the state's tallest building - had their windows blown out, scattering glass throughout downtown. El Paso Corp., the natural gas distributor, said its towering offices had power but sustained water damage when some windows shattered.

But in a city that loves to shop, there was a bright spot. Hurricane Ike largely spared the city's west side so much of The Galleria - the high-price, high-fashion shopping mall, was open and bustling.

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Associated Press writers Wendy Benjaminson, Andre Coe and John Porretto contributed to this report.