Washington - Texas was still picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ike on Wednesday as states across the Midwest tallied the number of dead and injured from the mammoth storm that cut a swath of devastation across the United States. Houston Mayor Bill White proclaimed his city's water safe to drink, telling reporters he had tried it and urging other Houstonians to do the same.
The bottled water being brought in by state and federal rescue officials should be reserved for people truly in need, he said.
At least four dozen people in the US were reported dead from Ike's fury after it made landfall on Saturday and moved across ten states, media reports said. The storm had already killed 80 people in the Caribbean on its way to Texas.
The dead included 17 people in Texas, which bore the brunt of the hurricane-force winds, seven people in Indiana and six in Ohio, officials in those states said.
Indiana's emergency management agency saidlots of local roads were still under water, but that the worst of the damage came from high winds over the past days.
"The deaths for the most part were in the southern part of the state, from drownings," spokesman John Erickson told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa. "The wind brought down trees that killed some people."
In hard-hit Galveston, Texas, search and rescue teams had completed their work hunting for survivors, marking the start of the often-grim phase of recovering bodies.
But officials were optimistic they had ducked a bullet amidst a growing chorus of complaints by hold-outs and evacuees about the slow delivery of food, water and ice.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff flew to Texas Wednesday to handle the flak and to defend "everybody here" for "working hard."
"Those whose butts need to be kicked will feel it in their butts, but I'm not going to get into a public discussion," Chertoff told laughing reporters.
Chertoff said said the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state had set up 63 points of distribution for aid, food and water.
An estimated 6,000 people who defied the mandatory evacuation order in Galveston insisted on staying as rescue workers searched the town, the Houston Chr
