HOUSTON — Weary residents of the Texas coast foraged Sunday for water, ice, generators and gasoline as rescuers continued to save people trapped by widespread floodwaters a day after Hurricane Ike flooded roads, destroyed homes and businesses, and knocked out power to nearly 4 million people.
Under drenching morning rain that submerged more roads and underscored a mood of misery and frustration, emergency officials tried to unsnarl a last-minute snag that delayed deliveries of U.S. government food, water and ice to several million people struggling to cope. Federal officials blamed state leaders for abruptly changing distribution plans Sunday morning.
The number of people rescued along the coast rose to nearly 2,000, many of them from hard-hit Galveston and Bolivar, barrier islands south of Houston. Rescuers vowed to go door-to-door to find holdouts who refused to obey evacuation orders.
The rescue effort, involving 50 helicopters and 1,500 searchers, is the largest in the state's history.
Utility companies delivered the sobering news that restoration of power could take up to a month.
Nearly 4 million people were without electricity in Texas and Louisiana, according to utility officials. Crews managed to restore power to several neighborhoods in and around Houston.
About 2,000 holdouts in Galveston, given the opportunity to evacuate their storm-tossed homes, agreed to board buses for shelters in San Antonio and Austin. City officials estimate that about 40% of the island's 57,000 residents stayed in their homes during the hurricane.
Three bodies were recovered in Galveston on Sunday, one of them from a submerged car, but local officials refused to provide details. That brought the number of deaths attributed to Ike in Texas to at least seven -- five in Galveston. A total of 21 deaths in nine states have been blamed on the storm, according to an Associated Press tally.
Federal officials said the hurricane destroyed as many as 10 oil production platforms, adding to pressure on gasoline prices in the face of a temporary shutdown of much of the oil and gas industry along the Gulf Coast because of the storm.
Houston police, concerned about potential looting, put the nation's fourth-largest city under a weeklong nighttime curfew.
In Houston and its suburbs, people who rode out the storm emerged from their soggy homes to jam Wal-Marts and home improvement stores such as Lowe's, standing in long lines that wound into flooded parking lots.
