Houston Ports, Airports Await to Reopen After Ike

HOUSTON-High winds, flooding and power outages left behind by Hurricane Ike will delay the return to work for many businesses in and around Houston, the country's fourth-largest city and center of the nation's energy industry.Airlines canceled flights to Houston on Sunday and planned only limited service Monday. Port officials weren't sure whether they could reopen for shipping as planned on Monday morning.Some of the city's big corporations announced that they wouldn't open their offices until at least Tuesday, after Ike's winds blew out windows in downtown skyscrapers and flooding closed major roads. Many employees were calling insurance adjusters after their homes were flooded.In the Gulf of Mexico, some offshore oil and gas platforms were destroyed, federal officials said Sunday. Still, there was relief that refineries, chemical plants and the country's second-busiest port sustained relatively minor damage.Before the storm made landfall Saturday morning, damage forecasts ranged from $8 billion to $25 billion, but then the storm's path spun away from the heart of Houston's ship channel and refining and chemical plants.Howard Mills, insurance adviser to the consulting firm Deloitte LLP, said the early forecasts were "a little bit high.""Houston is a mess, but not as bad as it could have been if the surge had gone up that ship channel," Mills said. "But you're still looking at very significant business-interruption losses. The power outages in downtown Houston alone are a problem."Beyond Texas, Ike's most obvious impact was being felt at the gas pump. Federal officials had bad news for motorists when they announced Sunday that the storm destroyed at least 10 oil and gas platforms and damaged pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico.
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