Ivan Damages Highways, Railroad Tracks

s parts of the Southeast were dealing with heavy rains on Friday from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan, Gulf Coast states including Florida were dealing with severe highway and rail damage, news services reported.

Ivan was downgraded to a tropical depression on Friday morning, but 12 states from Alabama to Pennsylvania were warned of flash floods in the days ahead. President Bush declared parts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina major disaster areas, and about one million people were still without power on Friday afternoon, Bloomberg reported.

The storm broke apart portions of at least two highways -- including Interstate 10, which runs through the Florida Panhandle and is a primary east-west thoroughfare in the Southeast, the Miami Herald reported.

Freight railroad CSX Corp. said Friday afternoon 200 miles of high-volume track in western Florida could be closed for as long as two weeks because of damage from the storm. The damaged tracks between Pensacola and Tallahassee handle about 30 trains, the company said on its Web site.

Ivan was also responsible for knocking out about 120 miles of Norfolk Southern Corp. tracks in Tennessee, and other tracks near Asheville, N.C., were under water, Bloomberg reported.

However, Union Pacific and other freight railroads had resumed operations in New Orleans after shutting down prior to the storm.

Ivan was the third hurricane to hit the United States in six weeks, and was expected to cost insurers as much as $7 billion, the Associated Press reported.

At least 24 deaths were attributed to the storm, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Floyd in 1999, AP said.

The Coast Guard said in a statement the Port for New Orleans reopened the Mississippi River to outbound maritime traffic Thursday night, although inbound traffic would still be required to complete the 96-hour screening policy prior to being allowed to enter.

A total of eight ports had shut ahead of the storm. It was not known when all of them would reopen.

Ivan was also responsible for pushing the price of crude oil futures in New York to a four-week high on concern that the shutdown of refineries earlier in the week would reduce U.S. inventories, Bloomberg said.

Crude oil for October delivery rose $1.67, or 3.8%, to close at $45.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Ivan prompted the evacuation of as many as 13,000 offshore oil workers, forcing producers to reduce output by 1.4 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service.

In addition, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port said it wasn't able to offload tankers on Friday as was previously scheduled. The port, located about 20 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, handles about 1 million barrels of crude oil imports a day.

Also pushing up the price of oil was speculation that the next storm, Jeanne, could reach the Gulf of Mexico next week, forcing platform evacuations and production cuts for a second time this month, Bloomberg said.

However, the National Hurricane Center's five-day projection had Jeanne coming ashore near the Georgia-South Carolina border late Tuesday.

And the hurricane center said the next storm, Karl, could become a hurricane over the weekend and reach the United States late next week.