By Chris Baltimore
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Hurricane Ike gathered strength as itchurned through the Gulf of Mexico's warm waters on Thursday ona track that would skirt the heart of the U.S. offshore oilpatch before slamming into the Texas coast late on Friday orearly on Saturday.
Ike is a Category 2 storm with 100 mph (160 kph) winds andcould come ashore as a ferocious Category 4 storm on thefive-step intensity scale with winds of 132 mph (213 kph), theNational Hurricane Centre said.
But the latest projections pointed Ike toward the middle ofthe Texas coast, skirting to the west of the main region foroffshore production in the Gulf, which provides a quarter ofU.S. oil and 15 percent of its natural gas.
Crude oil prices were trading just above a five-month lowof $101.36 per barrel set on Wednesday as weak demand and astrong dollar offset a surprise OPEC production cut agreementand hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico that have cut deeply intoU.S. energy supplies.
At 5 a.m. EDT (10:00 a.m. British time) on Thursday, thehurricane Centre said in its latest advisory Ike was 620 miles(995 km) east of Brownsville, Texas, and about 285 miles (460km) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Itwas moving west-northwest at 9 mph (15 kph).
New Orleans, still scarred by Hurricane Katrina, whichkilled 1,500 people and caused $80 billion (45.7 billionpounds) in damage on the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, appeared tobe out of danger.
However, the Centre early on Thursday extended a tropicalstorm warning as far east as the Mississippi-Alabama border,including New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. A hurricane watchremained in effect from Cameron, Louisiana west to PortMansfield, Texas.
Texas officials ordered some residents in low-lyingMatagorda and Brazoria counties to evacuate. Mandatoryevacuations had been illegal in Texas but the state changed itslaws after Hurricane Rita in 2005. So far evacuation totals arenowhere near the 2 million people who fled Louisiana coastalcities in the path of Hurricane Gustav.
Other residents were boarding up homes and businesses toprepare for hurricane-force winds that could arrive on Friday.
"Right now, we have people coming in and out," said SteveProbert, who works at a hardware store in the resort communityof Port Aransas, across the Laguna Madre from Corpus Christi."They're buying everything we have under the sun."
President George W. Bush declared a federal emergency forTexas, allowing some federal disaster assistance.
BUSES NOT BODY BAGS
Ike's current track would see it hit the Texas coast justnorth of Corpus Christi, a major Gulf Coast oil refining hub.
About 250 miles (402 km) of Texas coastline from MatagordaBay to Brownsville on the Mexico border are on alert forpossible mandatory evacuations due to wide uncertainty over thestorm's path. A line of buses made their way from CorpusChristi to inland shelters as the city evacuated some elderlyand sick residents.
Some residents in Brazoria County south of the low-lyingcoastal city of Galveston were ordered to evacuate.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that some resident would likelyresist evacuation calls but said he wants to see "buses, notbody bags." Perry put 1,350 buses on standby to carry possibleevacuees.
"We must have passed 50 or more people taking their boatsand probably every mobile home in the state was on the road,"said Margaret Romero, 67, who evacuated from Corpus Christi onWednesday. "Our entire street -- every house on our street wasboarded up."
Torrential rains from the storm could be more damaging thanits wind blasts, especially for heavily populated areas in theRio Grand Valley which already took a soaking from HurricaneDolly in July.
Ike could unleash up to four inches (10 cm) of rain onsouthern Louisiana, and produce storm surges up to five feet(1.5 metres) above normal tide levels, along with large andbattering waves in some parts of the Gulf on Thursday, theCentre forecast.
CUBA TAKES DIRECT HIT
In Cuba, big waves and storm surges were expected tosubside, but heavy rains on the island's western end couldproduce flash floods and mudslides, it said.
Ike has already caused widespread damage in Cuba.
Few official figures have emerged, but state-run mediashowed a panorama of destruction across the island, stillreeling from the more powerful Hurricane Gustav 10 days ago.
Ike struck eastern Cuba on Sunday with 120 mph (195 kph)winds and torrential rains that destroyed buildings, wiped outthe electricity grid, toppled trees, levelled crops includingsugar cane fields and turned rivers into roaring torrents.
A total of 2.6 million people were evacuated before Ike, orabout 22 percent of the country's 11 million population, butofficials said four people died in the eastern provinces.
Before Cuba, Ike hit Britain's Turks and Caicos Islands andthe southern Bahamas as a Category 4 hurricane.
Floods triggered by its torrential rains were blamed for atleast 71 deaths in Haiti, where Tropical Storm Hanna killed 500people last week.
(Additional reporting by Jeff Franks, Esteban Israel, MarcFrank, Rosa Tania Valdes and Nelson Acosta in Havana, JimForsyth in San Antonio, Jim Loney in Miami; Editing by DoinaChiacu and Eric Walsh)
