A monster-sized Hurricane Ike bore down on the Texas coast, threatening to rattle the sparkling skyscrapers of America’s fourth-largest city, shut down the heart of the US oil industry for days and obliterate waterfront towns already flooded with waist-high water.

Hurricane Rita ploughed into the Gulf Coast early today, lashing Texas and Louisiana with driving rain, threatening to flood low-lying regions and knocking power out to half a million people as transformers exploded in the pre-dawn sky.