Galveston officials urged residents not to return to the hurricane-damaged island and asked remaining holdouts to leave, explaining that the island lacks the public services to ensure their health and well being. If they’re hurt or sick, help might not be easy to get.

“We feel it will be one to two months before we have any sufficient capacity to deliver in-patient care,” said David Callendar, president of the University of Texas Medical Branch on the barrier island.

Other officials speaking at a noon press conference at the Galveston County Justice Center said that the lack of potable water in Galveston means illnesses could spread more rapidly for people staying on the island. Galveston also lacks electricity, and subsequently, refrigeration. Neither is there a blood supply in the area for major medical needs.

Galveston’s mayor on Tuesday suspended a short-lived “look and leave” program after miles of traffic backed up on the highway entering Galveston, and emergency workers had difficulty getting people to leave by the island’s 6 p.m. curfew. “We are working on a new plan that we hope to announce soon so we can get our citizens in and out in a day to check on their houses,” city manager Steve LeBlanc said.

With Hurricane Ike bearing down on Galveston Thursday, the local hospital decided it was time to get patients off the island. Mother Nature had other ideas.

First, a heavy fog rolled in, preventing planes from landing. Then the babies started coming.

The hospital, University of Texas Medical Branch, has one of the state’s largest neonatal care units. And September is the hospital’s busiest month for deliveries. So even as the staff evacuated infants, more kept arriving.

“We couldn’t keep up,” said Joan Richardson, a neonatologist who helped lead the hospital’s evacuation.

The short-term baby boom turned out to be the least of the hospital’s challenges. Inside the building, floodwaters began rising and eventually reached three feet in many areas, forcing the relocation of departments including the blood bank and pharmacy.

Then, as winds outside approached hurricane force, a fire broke out at a nearby marina, creating a massive plume of thick oily smoke that was sucked into the hospital’s air vents. The emergency room had to be moved to another building, the patients carried up stairs and through offices because the elevators had stopped working. Then, at the peak of the storm with winds howling, the hospital had to move its operating room because one of its generators failed.

Throughout, the hospital remained open and patients kept flowing in. With only emergency power provided by generators, the hospital had to cope without air conditioning or running water. Finally, this morning, the hospital turned over services to a special disaster team that has its own generators, equipment and personnel.

Most of the 560 staff members who stayed through the storm finally got to return to their houses — or what was left of them.

“Many of them were here because of their dedication, but they know they’ve lost their homes,” said Karen Sexton, the hospital’s executive vice president. “They’re very courageous people.”

Emergency workers forged further into the west end of Galveston Island Sunday, finding more bodies and further destruction.

The official death toll in Galveston now stands at five, two more than earlier in the day. One body was found in a truck, but no more details were available, according to city spokeswoman Alicia Cahill.

Emergency workers also found 20 more buildings that had collapsed, mostly near 61st Street and Avenue L, a neighborhood that had been inaccessible due to flood waters until Sunday. It isn’t known whether anyone was in the buildings when they collapsed.

Fire also continued to be a problem, with no water pressure available to fight fires. Another house burned Sunday, the 11th so far. The city has requested pump trucks to be able to fight any future fires. Police have also arrested seven people for looting.

With power and water not expected to be restored for weeks, about 2,500 residents evacuated the island on government-provided buses.

“The number kept going up and up,” Ms. Cahill said.

Many other residents are holding out, however.

“We ain’t left yet, we ain’t leavin’ now,” said Jack Page, as he hopped in the back of a pickup truck to get food in one of the few stores in town that had managed to reopen.

Mr. Page and others will face a long recovery. The city is requesting generators to restore power to a handful of water pumping stations near the hospital, emergency command center and a few other key areas, but water in the rest of the city will have to wait until natural-gas service is restored. The airport runway has been cleared, but the hangars were destroyed and supply planes can’t land until engineers check the structure of the runway.

Much of the west end of the island remains inaccessible due to debris in the road.
One of the many challenges facing Galveston authorities: animals. Dogs and cats are roaming the streets and the city’s emergency hotline has been flooded with calls from evacuees worried about pets they left behind. About three dozen longhorn cattle survived the storm on the west end and were seen Sunday grazing on the grass of a median strip.

The city is setting up a temporary animal shelter, complete with mobile veterinary clinic, and is flying in vets from Colorado, Missouri and California, as well as allowing local vets to return to the island to help.

The JPMorgan Chase Tower after Hurricane Ike . (AP Photo)

JPMorgan Chase Tower, the location of the The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones offices, appears to be one of the most damaged buildings in downtown Houston, with nearly every window on the first 40 floors facing east blown out by Hurricane Ike. I backed up my computer files, cleared my desk, put plastic over the computers and stored some critical stuff in an internal room. But a corner office faced east, and if the door blew open we likely face major damage. We’ve been told parts of the building will open Wednesday, but my guess is that severely damaged floors won’t be open for weeks.

Our house is without power and may be for a long while, although it appears to be intact. It sounds like I’ll be working from home — or maybe even from Brenham, Texas, where I am now, if we can’t return because of the power outage. Brenham is farm and ranch country a little over an hour from Houston, in normal conditions. We were on the edge of the storm, but did not get the brunt of it. Those closer in had a wild night.

It appears the storm really did travel directly over Houston’s center, and my neighborhood is pretty close to downtown. Nearby is a totally flooded route to downtown called Allen Parkway — the bayou rose and submerged it all, but the waters have come down since then. Our neighborhood, River Oaks, has no power and a lot of downed trees. So far no terrible stories, but it’s been really hard to get local neighborhood information. My worry is everybody like us who left is going to try to come back to see their house tomorrow and highways will be totally jammed.

The first inklings of problems at U.S. energy facilities began to surface Sunday in the wake of Hurricane Ike, as gasoline prices continued to surge in vulnerable pockets of the nation.

A small oil refinery in Louisiana is flooded, and crews were only able to gain access by boat. After conducting aerial reconnaissance, Chevron Corp. said several crude oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have been affected by Ike, which made landfall early Saturday in Galveston, Texas, as a Category 2 storm. Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s Houston gasoline terminal sustained damage.

Many ports remained closed.

An official from a large Louisiana refining hub said Ike caused more flooding that Hurricane Rita did in 2005.

Jason Barnes, a spokesman for the Calcasieu Police Jury, which is the governing body for the Calcasieu Parish, called the flooding “historic.”

Just a day after the energy sector breathed a collective sigh of relief after Hurricane Ike’s storm surge was smaller than expected, the magnitude of the work to be done became apparent. Energy companies still hadn’t fully recovered from Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall on Sept. 1, when Ike came barreling into the Gulf of Mexico. Heavy thunderstorms in Texas on Sunday hampered efforts to begin sorting through the debris.

Many key facilities, however, appeared to have escaped major damage, although most are still without power, as outages remain widespread across Texas.

Gasoline and diesel supplies took a hit from Gustav, which forced the shut-in of more than 10% of the nation’s refining capacity. Refineries accounting for one-fifth of U.S. capacity shuttered and several others reduced rates ahead of Ike, exacerbating an already tight supply situation.

Crowds of people stood in line and hundreds wrapped around a handful of grocery stores in Houston for the chance to buy food, water, batteries and other provisions. Chase Puig, 38, a U.S. Postal Service carrier in uniform was waiting in line to buy food. At home, he was without electricity like millions of others in the region. A few blocks away, dozens of other people were waiting in line to enter Lowe’s. Several of them were looking for tools to cut branches of fallen trees blocking streets or charcoal grills to cook food. A Lowe’s representative said the store had just received a delivery of 200 electricity generators from the East Coast.

Despite a weak performance by benchmark gasoline futures Sunday, prices at the pump continue to rise and have passed the $4-a-gallon threshold in several states on the back of shortages caused by Hurricane Ike. The average retail price of regular gasoline in the U.S. jumped 6.2 cents on the day to $3.795 a gallon on Sunday, bringing the total increase since Friday to 12 cents, according to AAA’s Fuel Gauge Report.

Gasoline prices averaged more than $4 in South Carolina and Georgia, which depend almost entirely on the Gulf Coast for gasoline supplies. Prices were also above the psychologically significant mark in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Midwest refineries are producing oil products at slower rates because virtually all of the production from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico – a regular source of crude-oil supplies – has been suspended for days. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to loan ConocoPhillips’s Wood River, Ill., refinery 200,000 barrels from strategic stockpiles. President Bush on Sunday reiterated that officials will be careful to watch for price-gouging.

The surge in retail prices is following a spike in wholesale prices that occurred as Gulf Coast refiners shut down ahead of Ike. It’s definitely a supply shock but one that could help attract greater import volumes from Europe.

Crude-oil futures sank more than $1 in early trading Sunday after early checks indicated Hurricane Ike didn’t inflict lasting damage to Gulf Coast oil installations.

Light, sweet crude for October delivery was recently down $1.56, or 1.5%, at $99.62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices earlier dropped to $99.44, the lowest since March 25, in a special early electronic trading session scheduled in response to the storm.

After Hurricane Ike scoured the Texas coast Saturday, nearly all the U.S. Gulf Coast’s oil and natural gas production was off line. The storm spared most refineries from major wind and water damage, though widespread power outages are keeping them from quickly returning to service. Sixteen refineries in Texas and Louisiana responsible for nearly a quarter of U.S. capacity are either shut down or facing flooding.

But the oil market, already caught in a downtrend fed by sputtering world demand growth, reflected a sense that worst-case scenarios were avoided.

“As scary as this storm was, it looks like the early reports of the damage are not as devastating as the market feared going into this,” said Phil Flynn, a broker and analyst at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago.

After being bid up late last week, Nymex gasoline futures fell a steep 13.26 cents, or 4.8%, to $2.6370 a gallon.

“Everybody sort of stocked up before the storm,” Flynn said. “Now it looks like wholesalers are going to be selling that gasoline.”

Prices could turn around as information on the hurricane’s impact trickles out. Ike’s storm surge caused heavy flooding in Lake Charles, La., and threatened to swamp three refineries there. It was unclear Sunday morning how the Citgo, ConocoPhillips and Calcasieu Refining Co. refineries have fared. The three make up about 4% of total U.S. capacity.

Other factors could also buffet the market. In oil-rich Nigeria, militants threatened to attack all oil vessels and facilities in the Niger Delta. Chevron Corp. Sunday said it has received reports of an attack on some of its Nigerian facilities.

“The market’s really trading on variables that it doesn’t know for sure,’ said Andy Lebow, senior vice president for energy at MF Global, a brokerage.