Hurricane Ike aims at Texas

Houston: Hurricane Ike gathered strength as it churned through the Gulf of Mexico's warm waters on Wednesday on a track that would skirt the heart of the US offshore oil patch before slamming into the Texas coast on Saturday.

Ike grew to a Category 2 storm with 100 mph (155 kph) winds and could come ashore as a ferocious Category 4 storm on the five-step intensity scale with winds of 132 mph (213 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.

But the latest projections pointed Ike toward the middle of the Texas coast, skirting to the west of the main region for offshore production in the gulf, which provides a quarter of US oil and 15 percent of its natural gas.

At 11 p.m. EDT (0400 Thursday GMT), the hurricane centre said in its latest advisory Ike was 675 miles (1,090 km) east of Brownsville, Texas, and was moving northwest at 7 mph (11 kph).

New Orleans, still scarred by Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion in damage on the US Gulf Coast in 2005, appeared to be out of danger.

Residents in low-lying Matagorda and Brazoria counties were odered to evacuate. Mandatory evacuations had been illegal in Texas but the state changed its laws after Hurricane Rita in 2005. So far evacuation totals are nowhere near the 2 million people who fled Louisiana coastal cities in the path of Hurricane Gustav.

Other residents were boarding up homes and businesses to prepare for hurricane-force winds that could arrive on Friday.

"Right now, we have people coming in and out," said Steve Probert, who works at a hardware store in the resort community of 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 for Texas, allowing some federal disaster assistance.