As masses fled the fury of the killer storm that claimed scores of lives in the Caribbean, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an urgent and ominous warning to the inhabitants of his state.

"My message to Texans in the projected impact area is this -- finish your preparations because Ike is dangerous and he's on his way," Perry said.

Forecasters said Ike likely would arrive on shore here late Friday or early Saturday, packing winds in excess of 120 miles (190 kilometers) per hour by the time it makes landfall, and generating a storm surge that could reach 14 feet (four meters).

Oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico was largely shut off, the US Department of Energy said in Washington, and the US space agency said it was closing its Johnson Space Center in Houston "until the threat of Hurricane Ike has passed."

Authorities in Harris County, the jurisdiction Houston falls within, said evacuations of the city's most flood-prone areas -- home to about a quarter million residents -- began at 1700 GMT.

Ike, which has left more than 100 dead across the Caribbean, could slam into the Texas south of the port city of Galveston. Houston, just inland from Galveston and on track to feel some of Ike's wrath, is home to 2.2 million people, and its metropolitan area is the country's sixth largest, topping 5.6 million.

Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst told CNN Thursday that a mass mobilization effort ahead of the storm's arrival was well underway.

"We have been moving supplies and moving buses now for four days," he said. "We have moved C-130s (transport planes) and ambulances. We have 1,350 buses we have moved into the area."

Officials said the evacuations commenced with the elderly, infirm and other residents with special needs. Houston officials planned to re-route highway traffic and said fueling stations would be placed on major roads to facilitate the exodus.

But some residents resisted the order to clear out.

"Unless it's really bad, we don't want to go anywhere," said Galveston resident Leslie LeGrande.

At 2100 GMT the National Hurricane Center in Miami said the storm had maximum sustained winds of around 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour, making it a Category Two storm on the five-level Simpson-Saffir scale.

Ike was located about 645 kilometers (400 miles) east-southeast of Galveston and was moving west-northwest at about 17 kilometers (10 miles) per hour.

"Ike is forecast to become a major hurricane prior to reaching the coastline," the Hurricane Center said, adding however that "weather will deteriorate along the coastline long before the center reaches the coast."

Forecasters warned that the sprawling storm could gain force before it crashes into the coast near Houston, the key US oil hub and major space center.

Oil and gas production in the Gulf was largely shut off, though the US Department of Energy said Ike appeared likely to spare most installations there.

"Current projections show it missing most of the Gulf's oil and gas installations and hitting the Texas coastline sometime late tomorrow," the department said in a statement.

"Some 95.9 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's 1.3 million barrels per day of oil production and 73.1 percent of its 7.4 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas production has been turned off," it said.

The bulk of US oil refineries are in the Gulf of Mexico, and Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had evacuated personnel from its offshore installations as of Wednesday.

NASA, meanwhile, shuttered its Johnson Space Center in Houston, which houses mission control rooms for the International Space Station and space shuttle flights, and activated back-up teams at facilities in Austin, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama.

A columnist for the city's main newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, warned that the effects of the storm on the city could be devastating. "As of now, Houston couldn't be much more at risk than it is," the newspaper column warned.

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