HOUSTON (Reuters) -- Hurricane Ike barreled into the densely populated Texas coast near Houston early on Saturday.

The storm drove a wall of water 20 feet high and sent huge waves crashing against a 17-foot (5-metre) sea wall built to protect the city after a hurricane in 1900 killed at least 8,000 people. Most of the 60,000 residents evacuated and there were no immediate reports of deaths in the area.
Some 50 miles inland, the storm lashed downtown Houston's glass-covered skyscrapers and sent debris flying.
The hurricane has shut down 17 oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the heart of the U.S. oil sector where 22 percent of fuel supplies are processed.
More than a million Texans heeded evacuation orders and headed inland, but officials said they were worried that many people had stayed in their homes.
""It's not a time to play chicken with the storm,"" U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Friday.
Some people who had ignored a mandatory evacuation order called to be rescued. They received no response because emergency workers were ordered off the streets, officials told the Houston Chronicle.
Help was not expected until after the dangerous storm conditions subsided.
""We don't know what we're going to find tomorrow,"" Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas told the newspaper. ""We hope we'll find that the people who didn't leave here are alive and well.""
""When I woke up, my bed was floating in the house,"" said David Daubuisson, a handyman who narrowly escaped from his home in Bayou Vista. ""I just took what I could and got out.""
Local authorities reported more than 1 million customers were without electricity in Galveston and parts of Houston, and utilities warned of a massive power outage.
A dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed in evacuated areas around Houston to prevent looting.
The Coast Guard had to rescue 65 people from rising waters on the Bolivar Peninsula, east of Galveston.
U.S. crude oil futures rose 31 cents on Friday to $101.18 a barrel after dropping below $100 for the first time since early April as concerns over U.S. economic weakness outweighed storm disruption fears.
Houston airports were closed and hotels were jammed with those seeking shelter.
Ike could be the third-most destructive storm in U.S. history behind Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Andrew in 1992, experts said.
The costliest storm in U.S. history, Katrina, devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, killing 1,500 people and causing at least $81 billion in damage.