Hurricane Ike is expected to hit Texas tonight or early tomorrow as a Category 3 storm. More from CNN: 

Houston officials are telling residents to stay put because it’s not safe anymore to try to hit the road to escape Hurricane Ike.

The Category 2 storm had 105 mph winds as of 5 p.m. ET, according to the National Hurricane Center. It is expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday near Galveston, and by that time may have strengthened to a Category 3, forecasters say.

Ike is 900 miles wide, measuring the cloud cover at its widest point. On Friday, its tropical storm-force winds extended up to 275 miles — the length of the Texas coastline — from its center, for a total reach of about 550 miles.

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Although Ike was a couple of hundred miles away on Friday afternoon, authorities had rescued more than 120 people stranded by rising seas along the southeast Texas coast.

The U.S. Air Force and Coast Guard said earlier Friday that because the weather had deteriorated so severely, they would not be able to rescue by helicopter 22 people aboard a 584-foot Cyprus-flagged freighter. It was trying to beat the storm heading south from Port Arthur, Texas, when it lost power about 90 miles south of Galveston, Coast Guard Capt. Bill Diehl said.

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The weather service painted a vivid picture in its warning of the destruction it expects: a towering wall of water crashing over the Galveston Bay shoreline as the brunt of Ike comes ashore. That wall of water could send floodwaters surging into Houston, more than 20 miles inland. 

“All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities … will be inundated during the peak storm tide,” the weather service warned. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”