When hurricanes strike, we hear a lot about rig and platform evacuations offshore and shut-in production. At last count the Minerals Management Service said 49 production facilities were destroyed when Hurricane Ike came through on the night of September 12. And BP's Mad Dog platform lost its derrick to Davy Jones' Locker. Devon Energy Corp. lost two production platforms in Eugene Island. Ironically, these had survived Katrina and Rita in 2005, but the company, wanting to be prudent, spent about $5 million to upgrade them for the next big storm. Now they are gone anyway, and so is about 1,200 barrels a day of production that Devon operated. "We were so proud of the fact that we recognized their vulnerability, and we proactively raised their decks by another 14 feet higher. Lo and behold, a loose drilling platform came through and took them out," spokesman Chip Minty tells me. Note that Ike wreaked havoc in the onshore oil patch as well. It went right up through East Texas where the Haynesville/Bossier play is. GMX Resources Inc., of Oklahoma City, said on Sept. 22 that three of its Haynesville horizontal spuds there have been delayed from the third quarter of this year to the fourth thanks to Ike. "We are also experiencing delays in shipments of critical materials, causing the delay of two proposed Haynesville horizontal wells," the company announced. This will move production from three planned fourth-quarter wells to an early 2009 time frame. You know about the JPMorgan Chase tower in downtown Houston, where most of the windows were blown out. But Devon Energy also suffered damage to its offices downtown, at Two Allen Center and Three Allen Center. The firm has about 1,200 employees in Houston. The roof of one of the buildings was peeled back and thus, Devon Energy suffered severe water and wind damage to the top two floors. Offices there will basically have to be ripped back to the wall studs and rebuilt, Minty tells me. There is water damage to the two floors below those as well. Essential personnel are working from home and a few critical people are coming to the office downtown, he said. Throughout the Gulf Coast, some 1,600 employees were affected by the storm. --Leslie Haines, Editor-in-Chief, Oil and Gas Investor, lhaines@hartenergy.com