A Million Flee as Huge Storm Hits Texas Coast

Slide show http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/12/us/0912-IKE_3.html

Hurricane Ike lashed the Texas coast Friday night with 110

mile-per-hour winds as it churned toward this city and threatened to devastate Galveston and other towns along the Gulf of Mexico with a wall of seawater 20 feet

high.By late in the day, more than a million Texans had left their homes for safer pl aces inland, but tens of thousands decided to tough it out, and the authorities feared that those people had put their lives at risk. Officials in Galveston, on a vulnerable barrier island, estimated that 40 percent of the city’s 57,000 residents had ignored an order to evacuate.

As many as 100,000 homes could be inundated by the wall of water expected to hit the coast, federal officials warned, and millions of people could be left without electricity.