Rescue crews canvassing neighbourhoods with dump trucks, helicopters and airboats have saved nearly 2,000 residents along the Texas coast who ignored evacuation orders and stayed to face Hurricane Ike.
Heavy rains hampered rescue efforts in the hardest-hit areas of the Texas and Louisiana coasts, but crews worked around the clock to go door-to-door to find survivors of the massive storm. Those plucked from flooded homes were being loaded onto a fleet of buses, bound for shelters farther north.
Leaders in communities along the devastated coast warned it would be weeks, even months, before the towns were liveable. Two-storey homes had been flattened into pancakes, yachts were tossed like toys onto major roads, and utilities were cut off.
"Galveston has been hit hard. We have no power. We have no gas. We have no communications. We're not sure when any of that will be up and running," said Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas.
"We want our citizens to stay where they are. Do not come back to Galveston. You cannot live here right now."
Eight deaths were blamed on the storm - five in Texas, two in Louisiana and one in Arkansas. Authorities said three people were found dead in Galveston, including one person found in a submerged vehicle near the airport. Another person died in Arkansas when a tree fell on his mobile home as the remnants swept through.
At a news conference today authorities said that 1,984 people had been rescued so far in Texas, including 394 by air.
President George W Bush planned to travel to his home state of Texas on Tuesday to express sympathy and lend support to the storm's victims. He asked people who evacuated before the hurricane to listen to local authorities before trying to return home.
The storm paralysed Houston, the fourth-largest US city, as it moved inland. Houston officials imposed a week-long curfew from 9pm to 6am because most of the city was still without power. Darkened street lights and pooled water on highways made it difficult to drive. Schools would stay closed tomorrow and the business district was shuttered until further notice. The airports were closed to flights.
"In the interest of safety, we're asking people to not be out in the streets in their vehicles or on foot," Chief Harold Hurtt said.
The storm also took a toll in Louisiana, where hundreds of homes were flooded and power outages worsened as the state struggles to recover from Hurricane Gustav which struck on September 1st.
Hundreds of residents were wrapped around a high school in Galveston, some carrying pets, overstuffed duffel bags and medication as they waited to board a coach bus to a shelter.
On one side of the Galveston peninsula, two barges had broken loose and smashed into homes. Everything from red vinyl barstools to clay roof tiles littered the landscape. The second floor of some homes sat where the first had been before Ike's surge washed it out, and only the frames remained below the roofs of others, opening a clear view from front yard to back.
In Orange, Texas, Mayor Brown Claybar estimated about a third of the city of 19,000 people was flooded. He said about 375 people who stayed behind during the storm had begun to emerge, some needing food, water and medical care.
Ike was the first major storm to directly hit a major US metro area since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.
Ike weakened to a tropical depression early today, but was still packing winds up to 60 km/h as it dumped rain over Arkansas and travelled across Missouri.
Rescue crews were still finding it difficult to get into some flooded neighbourhoods, and were angered so many people defied evacuation orders. Though more than a million people did leave, by some estimates, as many as 140,000 stayed.
More than three million people were without power in Texas at the height of the storm, and it could be weeks before it is fully restored. Utilities made some progress by last night, and lights returned to parts of Houston. In Louisiana, battered by both Ike and Labour Day's Hurricane Gustav, 180,000 homes and businesses were in the dark.
AP