History > 2008 > USA > New Orleans, Louisiana (II)

http://www.nola.com/t-p/pdf/090208/A1.pdf

CLOSE CALL

While largely sparing the New Orleans area,
Gustav exposed serious vulnerabilities
the corps is rushing to fix.

Sunday, September 07, 2008
The Times Picayune
By Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer

Hurricane Gustav's hammering of southern Louisiana with storm surges of as much as 12 feet has had federal, state and local officials scrambling to repair damage to levee systems while keeping a wary eye on Hurricane Ike, now predicted to reach the central Gulf of Mexico by Thursday.

But some state and local officials fear such short-term "flood fighting" efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers, though essential, could delay two projects that may be more important in the long run: a new 100-year levee system, to be completed by 2011, and recommendations for protecting southern Louisiana from a Category 5 hurricane, to be submitted to Congress by December.

Gustav arrived at Cocodrie on Monday as a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind-based scale, although it had been predicted only a day before to make landfall as a Category 4.

Scientists say Gustav's surge was less dangerous than Hurricane Rita's when it hit Cameron Parish in 2005 with a surge the corps says was close to the new 100-year standard.

A 100-year surge event is one produced by a hurricane with a 1 percent chance of occurring at that site in any given year, not one expected to arrive only once in 100 years.

Scientists say Gustav's surge was lessened by its diagonal course onto land.

The combination of hurricane- and flood-protection levees along the Mississippi River plus the land masses of Grand Isle and the Fourchon headland also helped tamp down Gustav's surge and waves before they reached Houma and Morgan City, scientists said. They credit the "multiplelines of defense" strategy of using barrier islands, wetlands and man-made structures to reduce surge.

Federal, state and local officials all praised the resilience to Gustav's surge displayed by even the most fragile parts of the levee system. But they warned that storms producing only a slightly higher surge, or approaching land on different tracks, could overwhelm the area's still incomplete levee systems.

"Gustav was a physically larger storm than Katrina, although significantly less intense at landfall," said Ed Link, a University of Maryland research engineer and head of the Intergovernmental Performance Evaluation Task Force that studied levee failures during Katrina for the corps.

"Nevertheless, it generated significant surge along the east side of New Orleans and drove a lot of water into the IHNC (Industrial Canal) as evidenced by the 12 feet of surge that we watched on CNN," he said.

"That was a significant test, especially the limited overtopping that occurred, which during Katrina caused a lot of erosion behind structures and led to their demise," Link said. "The repaired and replaced structures, which had applied the lessons learned from Katrina, showed increased strength and resilience."


--- Multiple projects ---

But, Link said, Gustav also showed the importance of completing the 33-foot-high concrete surge barrier and gates between levees along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in eastern New Orleans and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet in St. Bernard Parish that will block water from Lake Borgne from entering the Industrial Canal.

Under a contract awarded earlier this year, a team led by Shaw Environmental will finish the first half of the barrier, about 20 feet high, by June 2009. The rest of the barrier will be finished by June 2011.

"That barrier is an effective way to prevent large amounts of water from getting into the heart of the city via the IHNC," Link said. "The other alternative is to rip out many miles of existing structures and replace them with much higher and stronger structures, a task that would require considerably more time and money."

In the meantime, the way the surge caused numerous ships and barges to break loose from their moorings in the Industrial Canal worries state officials.

"We have very serious concerns about this whole issue," said Garret Graves, a senior adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal and chairman of the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which oversees levee authorities in the state. "There never should have been circumstances where we have vessels of any size floating around that canal with those walls. They continue to be some of the most vulnerable parts of the hurricane-protection system."

He said the state is convening a group to come up with solutions to the problem. A Coast Guard investigation also is under way.

The corps is also working to make the existing floodwalls more resilient to surge, even if they're overtopped in future storms.

Workers are stacking additional sand-filled Hesco baskets atop those placed on the water side of Industrial Canal floodwalls before Gustav to raise that additional layer of protection to at least 12.5 feet, the same height as the walls they're protecting.

The corps also will be improving splash protection on the backside of the walls along the canal.

Those are among nearly 20 repair or strengthening projects the corps started in Gustav's aftermath. Senior corps officials in Washington are following their progress via daily briefings that also track the progress of Hurricane Ike.

Once immediate repairs are complete, local corps engineers and contractors will return to work on 100-year protection projects or on the longer-term Category 5 study.

But Randy Cephus, a spokesman for the corps' New Orleans district, said he doesn't know yet whether the Gustav-related assignments -- or future reassignments of personnel to deal with other storms -- will delay either the 100-year levee work or the long-term study.

Jerry Spohrer, top administrator for the West Bank levee board, warned that delays in completing West Bank levees are possible, despite the best intentions of the corps and its contractors.

"Everybody's trying to get it done as quickly as possible," Spohrer said. "If you have a contract that takes 600 days to construct, how do you get that done quicker? You don't build in six weeks what hasn't been built ever."

Unless even more money is added to the $14.7 billion already slated for construction of new levees and the corps redoubles its efforts, Graves said he expects the corps eventually will tell the state that its goal of completing the 100-year protection by 2011 can't be met.

"The corps' schedule for 2011 is laid out in excruciating detail, and I assure you that no time was allowed for Hurricane Gustav in that schedule," Graves said. "Everybody in the corps has been working on flood-fighting efforts related to this hurricane and preparing for Ike, and that certainly does pull resources away from the 2011 work.

"But the 2011 goal is not negotiable from the state perspective."

Jefferson Parish officials said aggressive demands for action worked in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005.

"I'm still certain that if it were not for Katrina and Rita, we wouldn't even have seen the construction that we have going on at the Harvey Canal right now," Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts said. "That put the focus on our weak points."

But that success required repeated calls for action by local officials, Roberts said.

Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed that the Harvey Canal floodgate at Lapalco Boulevard is in place as a direct result of that urgency.

In the past, he said, that project "never got the traction or the complete funding that it needed. After Katrina, it did -- and it was built. Thank goodness it was here, because . . . when it was time to make a decision to be proactive and close the gate, we had a gate to close."


--- Channels bring surge ---

Meanwhile, Gustav's close call has renewed demands for speeding up the start of major wetlands and barrier-island restoration projects and for implementing stricter building codes and development restrictions to limit damage in the future.

"Gustav taught us the lesson that time is not our friend," said Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane Law School. "A Katrina can happen again, and it can happen sooner rather than later.

"And one day, as much as we don't want to face it, we'll be looking at a storm that grows so fast and so big, we won't have five days to evacuate," Davis said. "And that's what we should be preparing for.

"Right now, an increased level of protection is not authorized or funded. Large-scale coastal restoration is not authorized or funded. Rehabilitation of the MR-GO region is not yet authorized and not yet funded."

Local governments also have to improve land-use planning, strengthen building codes and require people to build above expected flood levels, he said.

"We have to get honest with which communities we can make safe in time to matter," Davis said. "Some communities that flood repeatedly are not going to get levees, or brand-new pumps, in time to matter.

"And they have to get serious about requiring elevation or restrictions on where development will be allowed next, and what kinds of construction they will allow," he said. "And those communities that we can't do anything else for, evacuation should be something that is ingrained into them, something they should expect."

Davis was equally blunt about the failure of federal and state planners to recognize the threat from storm surge moving into coastal communities through navigation channels.

"We have made a decision as a community to defend yesterday's navigation system, instead of planning for tomorrow's New Orleans," he said.

He said it's also time to recognize the threat the Harvey Canal poses to the West Bank, as well as the danger of what he called the "placating of special interests" by moving levees farther south so they would theoretically protect more land, thus making more development possible.

"They've got to make survival of (the West Bank) the No. 1 purpose of their levee designs. And if they do that, not only can they keep the canal, but have a better one," Davis said. "A Harvey Canal without Jefferson Parish around it is a ditch without a purpose."

. . . . . . .

Staff writers Meghan Gordon and Sheila Grissett

contributed to this report.

CLOSE CALL, TsP, 7.9.2008,
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1220766092123480.xml&coll=1

Relief in New Orleans;

punishment in Baton Rouge

September 4, 2008
Filed at 12:51 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) -- The path of Hurricane Gustav offered New Orleans a reprieve, but 80 miles away where utilities say the devastation was the worst they have ever seen, the storm offered nothing but punishment.

The region's top power company, Entergy Corp., said the Baton Rouge area has never suffered damage as severe as that caused by Gustav. The last storm that caused damage close to Gustav was in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida, crossed the Gulf of Mexico and then slammed Louisiana.

Co-op Dixie Electric Membership Corp., based in Baton Rouge, at one-time reported all 95,000 members were without power. The last time that happened: 1992.

Renae Conley, president and chief executive of Entergy Louisiana and Entergy Gulf States Louisiana, has said Gustav was not as bad for New Orleans as Katrina three years ago, but that the situation was worse in Baton Rouge.

''It is pretty devastating to see the amount of transmission damage for the state,'' she said.

Entergy and Dixie Electric have said it may be weeks before all power is restored.

Trees are down, power poles have been snapped in half and the transmission system was hammered. Utilities, hindered by torrential rains and the threats of tornadoes until the weather began to improve Thursday, must negotiate hills, woods and swamps to get power restored.

The Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities in Louisiana, estimates that half the power will be restored in nine days, but that it will take up to four weeks before all power is back.

Gov. Bobby Jindal said that's unacceptable. ''Power continues to be the most critical obstacle to the recovery of our state,'' he said.

The Department of Energy said Thursday morning that 1 million customers are without power, including 925,963 in Louisiana. That is down nearly 200,000 customers from Wednesday afternoon.

Entergy is reporting 700,000 customers without power Thursday morning, down from a peak of 850,000 Tuesday morning and the second most in the utility's 95-year history trailing only Katrina in 2005 when the utility had 1.1 million outages.

Cleco Co. was reporting 128,798 outages Thursday morning, below 50 percent of its total customer base, and said it expects to have power to all of its customers who can take it by Tuesday.

    Relief in New Orleans; punishment in Baton Rouge, NYT, 4.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Gustav-Utilities.html

In Reversal,

New Orleans Lets Residents Return

September 4, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS — With thousands of residents stacked up at entrances to this city, impatient to return home after evacuating for Hurricane Gustav, Mayor C. Ray Nagin shifted course Wednesday morning and ordered an immediate lifting of barriers blocking their entry.

Citizens began trickling back to hot, dank homes on the emptied streets by Wednesday afternoon, as the city — and much of the state — was still mostly without electric power. Despite angry blasts from Gov. Bobby Jindal and even a plea from President Bush, utility officials gave no word on when electricity would be restored. But some residents said they had no choice but return, the intense heat and humidity notwithstanding.

The return had been scheduled for early Thursday, but Mr. Nagin’s unexpected action was forced by a slow-moving humanitarian crisis, as residents, many of modest means in this poor city, reported running out of money to sustain a prolonged evacuation.

They said they were sleeping in their cars, at rest stops and by the side of the road. Many were going hungry. In addition, the experience after Hurricane Katrina, when thousands were forced to stay away for months, had made them leery of being kept from their city for long.

Traffic was reported bumper-to-bumper for miles on the Interstate highways leading to the hobbled city, testimony to the immense clamor to return home after a storm that proved far less damaging than had been feared.

As soon as word got out over the radio that Mr. Nagin had backed down and opened the gates a day early, residents said they packed up, got in their cars and headed home.

“It was just expensive, the whole hotel deal,” said Trevor Chase, a waiter at the Creole restaurant Dooky Chase, as he stood next to his car on Painters Street in the Gentilly section. “We’d rather be without power.”

Mr. Chase had been in Baton Rouge for four days with his three children. “We can’t afford to be out like that,” he said. The financial strain had “caused a little stress on the family,” he added.

Gerald Hill, a construction worker, standing outside his modest cottage on Spain Street, said he too ran out of money for a motel. He had evacuated to Hattiesburg, Miss. Besides, he said, the motel “had roaches all over.”

Despite the mayor’s statements, Mr. Hill said, there was no reason not to come home. Mr. Nagin “was talking about ‘too much debris.’ I don’t see no debris,” said Mr. Hill, looking up and down the mostly clear street.

Mr. Nagin did not respond to a request for an interview Wednesday, but in a news conference Tuesday night he suggested that he did not like the idea of allowing residents back in while the power was still off. “This is not something I’m excited about,” he said.

Originally Mr. Nagin was vague about when residents could return, saying simply that it would be “days,” though not weeks. Then, under pressure, he suggested Thursday as the earliest date; finally, Wednesday morning, he lifted the blockade.

“A lot of people’s confused,” said Mr. Hill’s fiancée, Kimberly Tyler. “A lot of people don’t even know they can come back.”

There was criticism from other officials here over keeping residents away from their homes for any length of time after a storm that did little damage to houses in New Orleans.

“It was an absolute disaster,” said Councilwoman Stacy Head, noting that people do not mind sleeping in the heat. She said she had counseled the mayor as early as Monday to let residents back in.

“It was as clear as it could be that there was no alternative,” Ms. Head said. “There were people that were sleeping in rest stops. That’s not safe.”

For the most part, those returning had cars. Another 18,000 low-income residents shipped out on buses and trains in a city-state evacuation program could be returning this weekend or shortly before, Mr. Nagin indicated Tuesday night. Some 80,000 people remain in shelters in Louisiana and surrounding states; over all, two million people along the Gulf Coast left their homes before the storm.

The eagerness to return was palpable among those in the long traffic lines across the state.

“I guess we have an idea of what to expect because of Katrina, but I just won’t know until I get back," said Ingrid Simon of the New Orleans East neighborhood, who waited nearly an hour to get gas in Baton Rouge.

Cars were stacked up at filling stations across the state as tens of thousands hit the road, and at one near Donaldsonville, a fight broke out.

The failure to restore power quickly to about 750,000 homes and businesses in Louisiana emerged as a major issue Wednesday.

“There is no excuse for them to take so long to restore the power,” Mr. Jindal said. “We have to quicken the pace.”

All but one of 14 high-voltage transmission lines serving this part of the state remain knocked out, said Rod West, president of Entergy New Orleans, the major utility here. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. West said it could not be determined how long the power would be out.

Meanwhile, not a single Entergy truck was spotted in the city Wednesday in extensive tours through many neighborhoods, prosperous and poor. Mr. West’s spokesman did not respond to requests for an interview. The utility officials acknowledged, in news reports here, that street-level power distribution systems were far less damaged than they were during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Reports continued to come in showing the minor damage inflicted on the city by Hurricane Gustav, though the damage was worse in rural areas to the west. City officials said only eight houses had collapsed as a result of the storm, while during Hurricane Katrina a majority of the city’s houses were damaged. State officials said there had been 18 deaths, compared with 1,600 in Hurricane Katrina.

As residents trickled back, some wondered how much future evacuations would cost, and whether they would obey them.

“The problem is, there are two to three hurricanes a year,” said Burt Brunson, newly returned to St. Roch Avenue on Wednesday afternoon. “And we’re not going to evacuate more than once a year.”

Southern Coast Faces Storms

Emergency management officials in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina prepared on Wednesday for Tropical Storm Hanna’s landfall. The most recent forecasts show the storm landing in North Carolina on Saturday morning, although South Carolina remains a possibility.

No evacuations have yet been ordered in those states, but the action remains a possibility in the Carolinas.

About 1,200 miles to the east, meanwhile, Hurricane Ike gathered strength and appeared to be headed on the same course as Tropical Storm Hanna. The hurricane had winds of 135 miles an hour, making it a Category 4 storm.

John Schwartz and Jeremy Alford contributed reporting.

In Reversal, New Orleans Lets Residents Return, NYT, 4.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us/04orleans.html

New Orleans

Says Residents

Can Return Thursday

September 3, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — A mostly smooth evacuation from Hurricane Gustav turned sour on Tuesday as many New Orleans residents trying to return home were refused entry at roadblocks into the city or stranded in parking lots across the region.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Tuesday night that most residents would have to wait until just after midnight on Thursday morning to come back because power and medical care were not back to normal. A curfew will remain in effect at night.

The delay left many people sweltering and frustrated at the city’s edges, out of gas, money and food after several days on the run.

A dozen or so waited it out in the parking lot of a closed Circle K gas station in LaPlace, 30 miles from New Orleans, while dozens of others were in the same situation across Lake Pontchartrain, in St. Tammany Parish, according to officials and local radio reports.

Many of those who could not get in said that a house without power was preferable to another night sleeping in a car in a hot parking lot.

“They should let people back in, the storm is over with,” said Dominique Jones, a landscaper from east New Orleans who was leaning, shirtless in the broiling heat, against his truck, while his wife, Kim, a security guard, sat inside. “We might not have lights, but we can light candles. We have canned goods. We don’t have anything out here. We’re dead broke.”

New Orleans was spared on Monday by Hurricane Gustav, which knocked out power and downed trees but otherwise left buildings intact, the sewer system largely functioning and hospital emergency rooms open. The storm did not bring any serious flooding.

On Tuesday, power remained off at nearly 80,000 homes in New Orleans and tree limbs littered the streets. City officials listed these and other factors as reasons that they were not ready for the return of hundreds of thousands of residents who heeded Mr. Nagin’s mandatory evacuation call over the weekend.

Although Thursday will be the return date for most residents, business owners will be allowed in on Wednesday. Several other nearby parishes planned to allow residents back on Wednesday.

Thursday seemed unthinkably distant for those who disregarded the official warning not to return and tried unsuccessfully to make it through the barriers at the entrances to the city.

“What are they going to do about people that get stuck out on the side of the road without money or gas?” asked Raymond Taylor, a taxi driver from the Gentilly neighborhood, sitting in his cab.

Merlene Demourelle, a Mid-City resident, dismissed the inconveniences that awaited her at home.

“We’re tired, we’re hungry, we’re out of money, and we want to take a bath,” she said. “Sleeping in darkness — we’re used to that in New Orleans. Our lights always go off.”

Ms. Demourelle and three traveling companions from the city spoke of encountering hostility upstate and of being turned away from shelters in towns like Alexandria, Bunkie and Livonia.

“We slept in the parking lot during the hurricane,” she said of a church in Alexandria.

Her husband, Ronald, added, “We told them we was from New Orleans, and they wouldn’t take us.”

New Orleans, meanwhile, remained mostly deserted on Tuesday, with the occasional resident who ignored the evacuation order sweeping up outside. There was scant evidence of the cleanup promised by officials, with a carpeting of tree limbs, fallen magnolias and fractured crepe myrtles on the streets.

In Baton Rouge, Gov. Bobby Jindal highlighted the state’s successes in the Hurricane Gustav operation in a news briefing on Tuesday, quoting numerous statistics: 1,800 National Guard troops working on debris removal; 92 crews from the State Department of Transportation clearing Interstate highways; generators dispatched to nursing homes; and the “predeployment” of commodities in hard-hit southeastern communities like Houma, Morgan City and New Iberia.

Ten deaths have been attributed to the storm so far, six of them occurring during the evacuation — far lower than the 1,600 killed in Hurricane Katrina three years ago. Still, Mr. Jindal said Hurricane Gustav was “a very, very serious storm that has caused major damage in our state.”

But the storm was also a major — and ultimately successful — test of the flood protection system that failed so disastrously during Hurricane Katrina. Monday night saw the debut of critical gates and pumps at the city’s drainage canals, and they worked.

The 17th Street Canal gates were closed just after 8 p.m., the pumps were fired up and the water level in the canal dropped three feet in the first hour. There was no powerful storm surge into the canal, which runs deep into the city and caused 80 percent of the flooding in the city after Hurricane Katrina.

“There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind” after the first true test of the pumps, said Col. Jeffrey Bedey of the Army Corps of Engineers, that “they worked pretty much as planned and designed.”

Mr. Nagin voiced the general feeling that the city had escaped another catastrophe. “We dodged a bullet,” he said on the “Today” show on Tuesday morning. “So we’re feeling pretty decent right now.”

Critics in New Orleans say Mr. Nagin exaggerated the threat from the hurricane — which ultimately blew no more than tropical-storm-force winds at the city — when he called it “the mother of all storms” on Saturday.

“I’d probably call Gustav the mother-in-law, the ugly sister, but other than that I’d do the same thing,” Mr. Nagin said on Monday evening.

In Houma, a city of 32,000 southwest of New Orleans that fell directly in the path of Hurricane Gustav, there was a very different picture on Tuesday. Enormous downed trees, snapped power lines and splintered telephone polls blocked largely deserted streets. Mangled pieces of metal dotted the roads. Gas station awnings were toppled, as were traffic signals, billboards and marquees.

Residents of New Orleans, though, seemed eager to return home and get back to fixing up the city.

“They evacuated us all right,” said Angelus Mitchell, a construction worker from the Eighth Ward, sitting on a camping chair in a parking lot. “But they didn’t have this part thought through.”

Mr. Mitchell had evacuated to Baton Rouge, but he said he was not going to return to that city.

“This don’t make no sense,” he repeated three times. “They’ve got us blocked away from our home, man.”

Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Houma, La.

    New Orleans Says Residents Can Return Thursday, NYT, 3.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/us/03gustav.html?hp

Downgraded Hurricane Gustav

Largely Misses City

September 2, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER, DAMIEN CAVE, KAREEM FAHIM and JAMES BARRON
This article is by Adam Nossiter, Damien Cave, Kareem Fahim and James Barron.

NEW ORLEANS — This nearly deserted city appeared to have escaped threats of full-scale devastation on Monday when Hurricane Gustav came ashore 70 miles to the southwest, bearing winds and rain far less formidable than earlier forecast.

The storm smashed through the bayou country of rural Louisiana, raising fears of widespread coastal erosion and damage to fishing villages that state officials were unable to confirm Monday evening. But before making landfall, it was downgraded from a Category 3 hurricane to Category 2 when its winds slowed to 110 miles per hour, from 115 m.p.h., and state officials said they believed that their worst fears had not been realized.

Hurricane Gustav weakened to a tropical storm late Monday as it moved over central Louisiana.

The levees in New Orleans were tested by a heavy storm surge but held, even though the repair and reconstruction work from Hurricane Katrina, is far from finished. In Hurricane Gustav’s wake, waves pounded against a floodwall on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, considered a particularly weak link.

Though the water lapped over the wall for hours, there was only ankle-to-knee-deep water on the streets it was protecting, on the edge of the Ninth Ward, a neighborhood that was hit hard after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, deputy commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers, said he did not expect any breaks in the levees this time.

“We’ve gotten no word of real flooding in the city,” Col. Jerry Sneed, the city’s emergency preparedness director, said in a midday interview. “We’re not getting any major destruction.”

“Right now,” Colonel Sneed added, “it’s looking pretty good for us.”

New Orleans was largely empty, as was most of the central Gulf Coast, after nearly two million residents heeded the pleas of officials to move north. The city’s mayor, C. Ray Nagin, refused to say at a news conference Monday night when people would be allowed back in, but he did say the public schools would reopen next week.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said a return would have to wait until roads and bridges were inspected and debris was cleared. Many streets in New Orleans were littered with downed trees and power lines.

Officials said that at least seven people were killed — four in traffic accidents and three from falling trees in Baton Rouge and Lafayette — along with three patients who died as they were being evacuated to hospitals or nursing homes beyond the hurricane’s reach. In an interview late Monday, the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, said he knew of no requests for rescues from people trapped in flooded areas.

Hours after Hurricane Gustav ripped shutters off buildings and left street signs standing in sudden surf, the Coast Guard tried to send reconnaissance helicopters to search for people who had stayed behind and needed help. Two took off from Mobile, Ala., but turned back before reaching New Orleans because the wind was too strong, said Harvey E. Johnson Jr., deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A levee protecting a small subdivision in Plaquemines Parish, southeast of New Orleans, was topped by floodwater late Monday, threatening a small residential subdivision. Parish workers struggled with sandbags to keep the water at bay.

The hurricane left more than a million households along the gulf without power — though many of the residents were not there to sit in the dark — and it forced the closing of offshore oil platforms that handle a quarter of the nation’s petroleum production. Several vessels broke loose in the inner harbor in New Orleans, but General Riley said they would not threaten the levees nearby.

Federal officials were determined not to repeat their missteps during Hurricane Katrina.

President Bush, who dropped plans to speak on Monday at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, flew to emergency command centers in Texas to be briefed on plans for dealing with the hurricane. Mr. Bush said the government’s response to this storm was “a lot better” than the sometimes confused response to Hurricane Katrina.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, went to Waterville, Ohio, where he helped pack supplies for the Gulf Coast. At the convention, Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, and the first lady, Laura Bush, appeared before a screen showing state-approved charities in states hit by the hurricane.

As Louisiana residents began thinking about returning home, the National Hurricane Center upgraded a new storm in the Atlantic to hurricane strength. Warnings were issued for the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. Forecasters said the new storm, Hurricane Hanna, was headed toward the East Coast on a path taking it somewhere between Miami and the Outer Banks of North Carolina by the end of the week.

Forecasters had worried that Hurricane Gustav, which slammed into Cocodrie, would arrive as a Category 4 storm with far more powerful winds.

Once the storm turned out to be less devastating than had been forecast, some officials fretted that they would face criticism for calling for a major evacuation. But with memories of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 still fresh, they said they had no regrets.

“There will be some criticism, potentially,” said Dick Gremillion, the director of emergency operations in Calcasieu Parish, La. “But particularly after Katrina, I don’t think anyone expects us not to do everything that we can to make sure no one is hurt.”

“We are not taking any chances in terms of people’s lives,” Mr. Gremillion added.

Mayor Nagin, who over the weekend described Hurricane Gustav as “the storm of the century” in pleading with residents to leave, would not back off those dire, if inaccurate, warnings. “I’d do the same thing,” he said, though residents may not be quite as willing to heed his advice the next time.

Mr. Nagin received praise for raising the alarm and ordering an evacuation. “I’m very proud of him,” said Jill Relick, who sat with her husband, Tom, on their porch in the Garden District of New Orleans, having disregarded the mayor’s pleas for everyone to leave. “There’s so many people who don’t have transport.”

Daunted by the television images of the clogged expressways, the Relicks decided to stay put. Their house was not damaged, though a mansion across the street, where a Brad Pitt movie was recently filmed, lost a window and a tree.

Just before the hurricane hit, Heather and Jed Imbraguglio finally thought about leaving. But they do not have a car and were not willing to jump on a bus with strangers and an unknown destination. As it turned out, most of their neighbors — also without cars — ended up staying, and the storm was not so bad.

“The ones headed straight for us always end up turning,” Mr. Imbraguglio said.

As the wind blew through the deserted streets, a group of bored police officers sat on rolling office chairs outside on Tchoupitoulas Street, watching a few of their colleagues “wind-surfing” down the long thoroughfare, one of them explained. Two officers would hold up opposite ends of a sheet and wait for the gusts to blow them down the traffic-less street on their rolling chairs.

Heavy rainfall could still flood some neighborhoods here, said Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the Army Corps of Engineers, because much of New Orleans is below sea level, which makes the city like a bathtub. “Now,” General Van Antwerp said, “it’s about draining the bathtub.”

The wind, blowing at about 45 m.p.h. with gusts of around 60 m.p.h., stayed within the official threshold for a tropical storm. Areas like Broadmoor, a neighborhood between the French Quarter and Jefferson Parish that were devastated by flooding during Hurricane Katrina, remained dry this time.

So did the all-but-deserted Lower Ninth Ward, which Hurricane Katrina pounded. Arthur Lawson, the police chief in nearby Gretna, La., said damage seemed relatively light “compared to Katrina, when you rode around and seen a lot of rooftops without a shingle on them.”

“You can ride around now,” Chief Lawson continued, “and see rooftops with hardly a shingle missing.”

In Mississippi, the hurricane cut power to at least 51,000 customers, carried a storm surge over coastal roads and flooded more than 100 homes. The worst of the damage occurred in the southwestern corner, where state officials said the storm surge at Waveland reached 11 feet, less than the earlier estimate of 15 feet. Residents were urged not to try to return until the flooding threat had eased.

Close to the Louisiana border, in Pearlington, police officers and members of the Mississippi National Guard gathered on a dry isthmus of road around 4 p.m. near several flooded neighborhoods where at least a half-dozen residents had been stranded.

Some had stayed to ride out the storm. Others like Gerald Watkins and his family came back on Monday morning because they thought the worst of the storm had passed. Mr. Watkins managed to flee, joining the cluster of police officers and soldiers, after seeing ankle-deep water in the home recently rebuilt after being destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“I just finished the downstairs on Friday,” Mr. Watkins said. He shook his head, standing in the rain, with his white T-shirt fully drenched. “On Friday.”

For now, he had more immediate worries. The water was still rising, and several of his relatives were on the other side of a flooded bridge.

His granddaughter, Ashley Gibson, 19, said she walked out on her own, barefoot, and barely survived while four family members went back in to protect their property and help neighbors.

Ms. Gibson put her hand up to her shoulder. “The water was up to here,” she said, adding, “It started to scare us.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Nagin had ordered a mandatory evacuation in New Orleans, the first there since Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana state officials said the evacuation was more successful than the one in 2005, but some problems slowed the effort and set off tempers, at least briefly.

The biggest problem, a state Department of Transportation spokesman said, was the difficulty in lining up buses, particularly ones that could accommodate people in wheelchairs. A backup plan to use school buses caused delays when National Guard troops had to lift disabled people one by one into them.

Another problem was the computer system that Louisiana officials had set up to register people boarding buses. The system was supposed to keep track of who was taken where, but it broke down as crowds at the evacuation sites grew. Ultimately, state officials decided to abandon the advanced registration effort because it was slowing the exodus.

Beyond New Orleans, the network of local emergency management agencies had worked through the weekend to evacuate people from towns like Lake Charles, La., and Beaumont, Tex.

Mayor Randy Roach of Lake Charles said danger from flooding remained as the storm brought several inches of rain to Louisiana and East Texas.

“It’s wait and see,” Mr. Roach said, “and there is a certain level of anxiety that you feel.”

    Downgraded Hurricane Gustav Largely Misses City, NYT, 2.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/us/02gustav.html?hp

Weakened Gustav

spared New Orleans, Gulf Coast

1.9.2008
USA Today
By Jerry Shriver and Rick Jervis

NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Gustav was downgraded to a tropical storm over central Louisiana on Monday night when winds topped out at 60 mph.

The storm spared New Orleans from major damage Monday, but high water tested rebuilt levees well into the night. It was the first test of the levees since Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the region. Water spilled over several levees, some of which are still under repair, but the city's pumps were working, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Still, flooding could slow the return of the 1.9 million people who evacuated Gulf Coast communities.

"We're still watching this storm because it has not passed the area yet," corps spokesman Maj. Tim Kurgan said.

Meanwhile, another storm, Hurricane Hanna, was building strength in the Caribbean and was on track to strike the Southeast this week, and newly formed tropical storm Ike was forecast to become a hurricane within two days.

Forecasters feared Gustav would be a catastrophic Category 4 storm, on a scale of 1-5, but it came ashore as a Category 2 with top winds of 110 mph. That was enough to tear roofs from homes and flood roads. It also sunk a ferry, and more than 1 million homes were without power. The extent of damage to the oil and gas industry remained unclear Monday evening.

Eight deaths were blamed on the storm, including four evacuees in Georgia when their car struck a tree. At least 94 people were killed by Gustav as it streaked across the Caribbean.

Jessica Schauer Clark, a forecaster at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Gustav would wash over northeast Texas and Arkansas this week as it moved northwest from the Gulf Coast.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said people should be able to return home 24-36 hours after the tropical storm winds abate. Meanwhile, a mandatory evacuation order and curfew remained in effect.

Crews will comb the city Tuesday to fully review the damage, said Nagin, a Democrat. Buses are in place and ready to bring residents back, he said.

Mark Oliver, a Los Angeles sales manager who waited out the storm in a New Orleans hotel, felt lucky.

"I was waiting for Katrina, the sequel," he said. But "we got a mellower storm."

Although New Orleans fared well, many parts of Louisiana were hit hard by the storm. Storm surge poked holes in levees between two low-lying parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, outside New Orleans, necessitating repairs using thousands of sandbags.

Gov. Bobby Jindal said the southern coastal towns of Morgan City and Houma have seen the worst of the storm, with roofs blown off, shattered store fronts and downed power lines and trees. Nearly 1 million people were without power throughout the state, Jindal said.

"This has been a very serious storm with devastating consequences for many communities. It's not over yet," said Jindal, a Republican.

Southwest of New Orleans, Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes sustained heavy damage, the governor said.

As evening fell, officials in New Orleans and in nearby parishes kept watchful eyes on levees, which were under assault by rising water.

A private earthen levee in Plaquemines Parish to the south of New Orleans was in danger of failing, prompting parish President Bill Nungesser to order an evacuation.

"It's overtopping. There's a possibility it's going to be compromised," said Phil Truxillo, a Plaquemines emergency official.

And in Jefferson Parish south of New Orleans, persistent southerly winds were pushing water up the Barataria Waterway, with the water overflowing its banks in places.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand urged residents in the lower Lafitte area to evacuate. High-water vehicles have been driving through the neighborhoods to pick up people.

In Mississippi, which sustained catastrophic damage from Katrina, no major structural damage was reported. Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, cautioned that the state was still at risk from possible tornadoes. Officials said a 15-foot storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns.

President Bush made brief remarks about Gustav while meeting Red Cross volunteers and Air Force personnel at Alamo Regional Command Reception Center — a staging post for relief supplies and evacuees at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio. "Nobody is happy about these storms. Everybody is praying for everybody's safety," he said.

He said the readiness of volunteers to leap into action after events such as Gustav was "one of the great things about our country."

"My advice to citizens? Find out how you can help," he added.

The biggest concern throughout the day was whether the levees on the west bank of the Mississippi River would hold.

The American Red Cross said it was housing nearly 45,000 people in 334 shelters in 10 states on Monday. The organization sheltered 35,000 during Hurricane Katrina.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who flew to the region to oversee emergency response teams, said search and rescue would be the top priority once the storm passed. High-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room were posted around the strike zone.

In New Orleans' historic French Quarter, center of the tourism industry here, initial damage from Gustav appeared to be minor.

Leaves and limbs littered Jackson Square on Monday morning, but behind it the iconic St. Louis Cathedral appeared to be intact. The life-sized statue of Jesus Christ, which lost a finger during Hurricane Katrina, faired better this time.

On Royal Street, famous for its upscale antiques stores, there were downed awnings, overturned garbage containers and debris. The same was true of Bourbon Street, parts of which had not lost electricity as of midday. Rescue workers, police and media gathered for coffee and to watch television coverage of the storm at a handful of bars and food service places that remained open.

"It wasn't bad — just some wind and rain and no power at the moment," said Louis Matassa, owner of Matassa's Grocery in the French Quarter. "There is good police presence, so I feel safe. We'll be all right."

The storm forced the paring down of the opening day of the Republican Party's national convention in St. Paul. The party planned only routine business that must be performed for the convention to continue.

Bush and Vice President Cheney canceled plans to attend the convention because of the storm.

"I hope and pray that we will resume our normal operations as quickly as possible, but some of that, quite frankly, is in the hands of God," said presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, who was campaigning in St. Louis.

FEMA director David Paulison, who flew to Texas with the president, told reporters that there had been "unprecedented co-operation" between federal, state and local officials, contrasting it favorably with the poor coordination among government agencies in response to Katrina.

Contributing: Donna Leinwand, Larry Copeland and Marisol Bello in Louisiana; Steve Marshall and Douglas Stanglin in McLean, Va., Randy Lilleston in St. Paul; the Associated Press.

    Weakened Gustav spared New Orleans, Gulf Coast, UT, 1.9.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-09-01-gustav-monday_N.htm

Storm Tests New Orleans Levee System

September 2, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and GRAHAM BOWLEY

NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Gustav battered rural Louisiana with rain and powerful winds on Monday, and officials said the storm and rising waters were testing New Orleans’s levee system, which is still being rebuilt after the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

The storm struck the Gulf Coast about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans and began to make its way inland. It had been downgraded from a Category 3 to Category 2 hurricane, on a scale of 1 to 5, because its winds had slowed to 105 miles an hour from 115 m.p.h., according to the National Weather Service.

In New Orleans, water was lapping at the tops of the levee walls, though officials at the Army Corps of Engineers said they still did not think the walls would be breached. By 1 p.m. Eastern time the center of the hurricane was about 65 miles southwest of New Orleans. As the storm continues to pass to the west of the city, the ongoing rain and winds are likely to continue posing a challenge to the levee walls.

The center of the storm struck land at Cocodrie, La., the National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin at 11 a.m. Eastern time. As the hurricane moved inland, the National Hurricane Center showed it cutting a broad swath that includes the towns of New Iberia, Baton Rouge, Houma, Morgan City and Thibodaux.

In Terrebone and Lafourche, two parishes in southern Louisiana that sit in Gustav’s path, streets were flooded, thousands of homes and buildings had lost power, and people who had missed the last city buses out of town on Sunday were hunkering down in shelters.

One man, Earl P. Johnson Sr., who lives just north of Thibodaux, a city of 14,000 people in Lafourche, said he had initially decided to ride out the storm as he had during Katrina. But after watching news coverage of the hurricane late Sunday night, he walked outside, flagged down a police car, and was taken to a local high school with other slow-moving evacuees.

“I wanted to see what’s going to happen first,” he told HoumaToday, a local newspaper. “After they said all that was coming, I said ‘I’m going to get out.’”

The atmosphere in the emergency operations center in New Orleans was tense. Workers on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal — considered a particularly weak link in the city’s levee protection system — said that the water level in the canal was a little more than 10 feet above normal, or about three feet from the top of the floodwalls. There was some reported spillover at the west floodwall, though officials said the water level there was no longer rising.

Concern was focusing on a railroad bridge across the canal that should have been raised because of the storms but was not, officials said. The bridge was restricting the flow of water out of the canal and causing the water level to build against a southwest corner of the canal floodwall, the Army Corps said. “It’s acting like a dike,” said Capt. Eric Marshall of the corps.

Television images showed water splashing over floodwalls on the canal. Captain Marshall said that water was hitting a concrete “splash pad” that the corps put down to prevent erosion, and the water did not appear to be undermining the wall. “We’re getting our money’s worth out of that armoring,” he said.

The floodwalls were designed to take on water to the top, though sections of the older levee failed with water levels well below the design height during Katrina three years ago.

Nearly two million people from Texas to Alabama fled the coast on Sunday, anticipating that the storm could rival Hurricane Katrina in its destructive power.

In New Orleans, the hurricane’s intense rainfall is still likely to cause flooding in the city, said Lieutenant General Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the corps, since much of the city is below sea level, and can be compared to a bathtub.

“Now it’s about draining the bathtub,” he said.

New Orleans was largely emptied of its residents after a mandatory evacuation order, as hurricane-force winds extended out from the center of the storm for up to 70 miles. The storm was moving northwest at about 15 miles an hour, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The drainage work is being handled by the New Orleans sewerage and water board, which mans a set of 30 pumping stations around the city. Those stations have a combined capacity to drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in a couple of seconds. But even so, the pumping can only lower floodwater levels in the city by a six inches per hour once pumping is fully underway.

Corps officials are monitoring water levels throughout the city, and especially the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, a waterway that is often referred to as the “Achilles heel” of the system until gate structures can be built to block storm surges there.

The coast was already being buffeted by powerful winds early Monday morning. Officials predicted devastation for towns in the storm’s path, tidal surges of up to 14 feet and possible destruction of parts of New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. But no significant change in the storm’s strength was expected before it made landfall, said the National Hurricane Center.

President Bush left the White House Monday to travel to Texas and was expected to visit Austin and San Antonio, the Associated Press reported.

By early Monday, the storm had already brought a significant storm surge to Mississippi, forcing state officials to close Highway 90, the main road running along the coast from Louisiana to Alabama.

Katherine Crowell, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, reported that at least 2,290 customers in Waveland, Miss. were without power as of 9 a.m., with many more outages expected.

“We’re definitely already feeling the impact of Hurricane Gustav,” she said. “All of the schools for south Mississippi are going to be closed tomorrow.”

On Sunday, interstate highways across the region had been jammed bumper to bumper in one of the largest evacuations in American history.

With memories of the shaky response to Hurricane Katrina fresh, officials from Mr. Bush on down were on high alert; Mr. Bush himself described the preparations and warned residents to get out of the storm’s way.

For the most part, the evacuation appeared to go smoothly, particularly the official efforts to get the poor, elderly and infirm out of New Orleans, Port Arthur, Tex., and other cities that could be in the storm’s path. There was no sign that the disaster of 2005 — when thousands were left stranded in misery for days and 1,600 people were killed, many of them elderly — would be repeated.

But even before it hit, the storm claimed its first three Louisiana victims, at least indirectly. Gov. Bobby Jindal said there were reports that three critical-care patients had died during the evacuation of hospitals throughout New Orleans. Mr. Jindal said one of the patients had a do-not-resuscitate order.

Their deaths occurred during the transfer of patients from more than 8,000 nursing homes and at least 27 hospitals to medical facilities in other cities, including Oklahoma City, which has accepted 150 patients from southwestern Louisiana, Mr. Jindal said. A total of seven states have taken in more than 29,000 residents at 107 shelters, he said.

In Mississippi, the National Guard went door to door on Sunday trying to roust residents who were still living in trailers after Hurricane Katrina. And in coastal Texas, hundreds of vulnerable residents were flown inland and thousands of others left by car.

Louisiana sent about 18,000 of its poorest residents by bus and train from New Orleans to cities upstate and to Memphis. They were among 1.9 million who left the Louisiana coast.

Mr. Jindal said it was the first time evacuation orders had been issued for both southwestern and southeastern Louisiana. Parts of coastal Alabama were under an evacuation order as well.

Landfall was predicted for an area 100 miles west of the city, with hurricane-force winds of 74 miles per hour or higher, extending out 70 miles. But weather officials warned that because of the size of Hurricane Gustav, areas well away from the center would be affected, including New Orleans, which could see several hours of tropical-storm-force winds of over 70 m.p.h.

New Orleans neighborhoods on the west side of the Mississippi River, closest to the storm’s center, were thought to be particularly vulnerable to a tidal surge coming through the marshes because the levee system is far less complete than in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, on the other side of the river. Once again, the historic neighborhoods along the east bank — the French Quarter, the Garden District and the Marigny — were thought to be relatively safe.

The storm weakened after a destructive passage through the Caribbean in which 81 people were killed. But officials warned residents not to let their guard down.

“This is still a big, ugly storm,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said Sunday morning. “It’s still strong, and I strongly encourage everyone to leave.”

Most seemed to have heeded his words. By midday Sunday, only around 10,000 people were left, the mayor said, out of a population of 250,000 to 300,000. Up to 95 percent of the residents of coastal Louisiana had fled, the State Police said.

Mr. Nagin used far stronger language than forecasters did to describe the storm, saying, “You need to be scared.” And his words appeared to have had the desired effect.

By late Sunday afternoon, the sky had darkened here and tell-tale breezes had begun to blow through the eerily deserted streets.

There was no traffic, no pedestrians and no open stores or restaurants. Windows were shuttered and boarded everywhere. Overnight, this city had been largely emptied of its population. Mr. Nagin said a curfew would be in effect by Sunday evening, with anyone outside subject to arrest.

Evidently intending to forestall the looting rampant after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Nagin promised lawbreakers a quick trip to the state’s notorious penitentiary, Angola.

“We have double the police force, double the National Guard force that we had for Katrina,” the mayor said, “and looters will go directly to jail.”

It was not clear, however, how he planned to bypass the state’s usual law enforcement procedures.

Interstate highways were turned into one-way exit routes out of town, jammed with traffic on I-55 north to Mississippi and I-10 east toward the Gulf Coast but away from the storm’s westerly path. The police had erected barriers blocking entrance into the city, and on the streets National Guard vehicles had begun to patrol.

Those who were left held their breath, hoping that Hurricane Gustav was not Hurricane Katrina’s brother and that the city would be spared.

In the one area partly resisting the mayor’s order — the Uptown neighborhood, which did not flood during Hurricane Katrina — a few diehards were hunkering down, anticipating days without electricity. They had stockpiled gasoline, water and, in some cases, guns.

“Nobody wants to leave,” said Jim Forly, a computer technician, standing on Chestnut Street. His brother David, a scooter mechanic, was wearing a pistol on his belt.

“You just have to get over the hype,” Jim Forly said. His whole family was staying. “We’ll know by Tuesday if it was worth it.” Others in the neighborhood said they, too, had guns at the ready.

In Mississippi, about 3,000 people had reached shelters throughout the state by Sunday afternoon, said Greg Flynn, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Mr. Flynn estimated that about a third of Harrison County, just under 50,000 people, had been asked to leave the area south of Interstate 10 around Gulfport voluntarily or with mandatory evacuation orders.

Most seemed to be going. By 4 p.m., plywood covered the windows of nearly every business along the main road north from the coast, from Jack and Diane’s Tattoos to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and most side streets were quiet. At one of the last fast-food restaurants still open, a half-dozen people said they were just picking up some food on the way out of town.

Texas authorities evacuated about 7,000 people from a three-county area around Beaumont, officials said.

Several hundred elderly and infirm people were flown on Air Force cargo planes to Fort Worth, and buses chartered by the state carried thousands of evacuees to cities like San Antonio, far from where the storm was expected to make landfall.

In Port Arthur, a refinery town of 57,000 people on the Texas-Louisiana border, the streets were largely deserted, and most businesses were boarded up in response to the state’s order to evacuate. A few people who intended to ride out the storm stopped at gas stations and convenience stores to stock up on water, canned goods, cigarettes and beer.

“The public heeded the warning,” said Chief Mark Blanton of the Port Arthur Police Department. “Last time, we were still fighting people who didn’t heed warnings.”

More than 900 people showed up at the Robert A. “Bob” Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur, where national guardsmen loaded them onto buses commissioned by the state. The center was full of elderly and infirm people, some of whom had been waiting for more than eight hours for a bus.

But Roosevelt Scott, 73, a retired truck driver, said he would rather stick out the storm in his house than spend hours on the highway, as he did during Hurricane Rita, which struck right after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mr. Scott had stocked up on $150 worth of frozen meat and bought a generator to keep the electricity going, he said. He was not going to run this time.

“Where you going to hide from God?” he said as he walked into a convenience store. “How you going to hide from him?

“There is a time to be born and a time to die. If he calls your name, you got to answer.”

Still, it was Louisiana that was expected to bear the brunt of the storm, and officials there hoped that the still-incomplete flood control system built after Hurricane Katrina would do its job. At the most vulnerable points in New Orleans — the canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain that spilled over so disastrously during Hurricane Katrina — Army Corps of Engineers officials expressed confidence that they would hold for Hurricane Gustav.

At the gate structure on the city’s London Avenue canal, intended to block the surging waters from the lake during a storm, officials told reporters Sunday that the New Orleans hurricane protection system was stronger than it was during Hurricane Katrina, though not complete.

“You can’t just build a levee overnight,” said Colonel Lee, the commander of the New Orleans district for the corps. But the repairs and upgrades that have been done, he said, have toughened the levees and made them less likely to fail even if water flows over the top.

Billions of dollars have been spent to shore up the region’s defenses, and gates and pumps like the structure at the London canal can protect more than 14 miles of vulnerable floodwalls that line these drainage canals from taking punishment from rising storm waters. But the higher level of protection designed to withstand serious flooding will not be complete until 2011.

And the picture is even less impressive on the west bank of the river. Some of the levees along a key canal, the Harvey, are just six feet high, and there are still other gaps.

“We are hoping and praying Gustav runs out of steam,” said Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the corps, as lightning flashed in the clouds over Lake Pontchartrain behind him.

Estimates of the storm surge pushed in front of the hurricane have dropped considerably in the past 24 hours, General Van Antwerp said, to 17 feet from as high as 25 feet — a relief, he said, since the newly raised levees that face Lake Borgne along St. Bernard Parish are 19 feet high.

But the storm remained strong, and it was clear by late Sunday that there would at least be far fewer people here for its force than there were for Hurricane Katrina.

“The vast majority of our people have heeded the warnings, have evacuated,” Governor Jindal said. “I think it’s unprecedented, when you see the medical evacuations, the nursing homes, the hospitals, the city- and parish-assisted evacuations.”
 

John Schwartz reported from New Orleans, and Graham Bowley from New York. Contributing reporting were James C. McKinley Jr. in Port Arthur, Tex.; Damien Cave in Gulfport, Miss.; Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, La.; Anahad O’Connor and Mike Nizza in New York; and Shaila Dewan, Adam Nossiter and Kareem Fahim in New Orleans.

    Storm Tests New Orleans Levee System, NYT, 2.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/us/02gustav.html

FACTBOX:

Gustav cuts US oil,

gas, Louisiana power

Mon Sep 1, 2008 8:30pm EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Hurricane Gustav, the first big threat to U.S. Gulf of Mexico energy and port infrastructure since Katrina and Rita in 2005, made landfall west of New Orleans Monday morning.

The following outlines the impact on the energy sector:

*****HIGHLIGHTS*****

*100 percent of U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil output shut

*95.4 percent of Gulf of Mexico natgas output shut

*27 percent of U.S. refining affected, 11 percent shut, 16 percent at reduced rates.

*433,600 Entergy customers lose power

*No damage assessments yet

*US waives gasoline standards in parts of Texas and Louisiana, ready to release emergency crude

*****CRUDE OIL, NATURAL GAS*****

*100 percent of U.S. Gulf of Mexico's 1.3 million barrels per day crude output shut as of Sunday, according to U.S. government.

*95.4 percent of the Gulf's 7.4 billion cubic feet per day natural gas output shut as of Sunday.

*****REFINING*****

*Ten refineries with capacity of 1.9 million bpd shut

*Eight refineries with capacity of 2.8 million bpd at reduced rates

REFINERIES NOT PRODUCING FUEL:

*ExxonMobil 193,000 bpd Chalmette, Louisiana.

*Murphy 120,000 bpd Meraux, Louisiana

*ConocoPhillips 280,000 bpd Lake Charles and

195,000 bpd Alliance, Louisiana, refineries

*Motiva 236,000 bpd Norco, Louisiana; 235,000 bpd Convent, Louisiana refinery on standby.

*Marathon 250,000 bpd Garyville, Louisiana.

*Calcasieu shut its 80,000 bpd Lake Charles, Louisiana

*Alon 80,000 bpd Krotz Springs, Louisiana

*Valero 250,000 bpd St. Charles, Louisiana

REFINERIES AT REDUCED RATES:

*ExxonMobil 503,000 bpd Baton Rouge, Louisiana; 567,000 bpd Baytown, Texas; 349,000 bpd Beaumont, Texas

*Citgo 430,000 bpd Lake Charles, Louisiana

*Valero 325,000 bpd Port Arthur, Texas; 130,000 bpd Houston, Texas, 245,000 bpd Texas City, Texas

*Motiva 285,000 bpd Port Arthur, Texas
 

*****ELECTRIC POWER*****

*Entergy says 433,600 of 1.9 million customers without power, 101,500 in evacuated areas, 332,600 in southeast and southwest Louisiana.

*Entergy's Waterford 3 nuclear plant shut Sunday night; River Bend nuclear plant powered down to 75 percent due to lower electricity demand.
 

*****SHIPPING AND PORTS*****

*Louisiana Offshore Oil Port stopped unloading ships Saturday and shut flows from storage Sunday

*Houston Ship Channel closed to inbound traffic at midnight Sunday (0500 Monday GMT), all outbounders already gone

*Mississippi River traffic at New Orleans halted inbound at noon (1700 GMT) Saturday, outbound as of 6 p.m. CDT (2300

GMT).

*Traffic at Lake Charles, Louisiana, halted Sunday

*Traffic at Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, halted Sunday

*Gulf Intracoastal Waterway closed Mississippi to Florida

*****PIPELINES*****

*Explorer Pipeline says entire 700,000 bpd products pipeline, Gulf Coast to Chicago, available Monday night

*El Paso's said its Tennessee and Southern Natural gas pipelines offshore throughput cuts total 2.5 Bcfd.

*TEPPCO's 340,000 bpd products line from Texas to Northeast cuts run rates, Beaumont distillate line down.

*Henry Hub natural gas trading hub shut Sunday.

*Enbridge stopped taking natural gas production Saturday on systems with 6.7 Bcfd capacity.

(Reporting by Bruce Nichols, Erwin Seba, Chris Kelly and Marcy Nicholson; Editing by Richard Valdmanis)

    FACTBOX: Gustav cuts US oil, gas, Louisiana power, R, 1.9.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKN0136509420080901

With Gustav,

Bush tries to avoid Katrina mistakes

Mon Sep 1, 2008
1:44pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush warned on Monday the danger to the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Gustav was far from over as he sought to assure Americans his administration has learned the lessons of the botched handling of Katrina in 2005.

"This storm has yet to pass. It's a serious event," he said at a briefing with emergency officials in Austin, after a weakened Gustav hit the Louisiana coast but appeared to spare Katrina-battered New Orleans its full force.

Bush, who flew to Texas after scrapping plans to go to Minnesota to address the Republican National Convention on Monday, insisted, however, that coordination of the emergency response to Gustav was "a lot better" than during Katrina.

Bush's hastily arranged visit to the region kept him well inland from Gustav's strong winds and lashing rains even as it weakened to a Category 2 hurricane before making landfall on the Louisiana coast to the west of New Orleans.

But the trip underscored Bush's determination not to be seen as out of touch, as he was widely viewed when Katrina devastated New Orleans three years ago, leaving a stain on his legacy and hastening his slide in popularity.

Bush's fellow Republicans prepared to open their convention in St. Paul on Monday to nominate John McCain as their presidential candidate. McCain, mindful of the political damage from Katrina, ordered toned-down festivities to avoid any hint of insensitivity to storm victims.

LESSONS LEARNED

With less than five months left in office, Bush was taking pains to show Americans he is deeply engaged in the biggest test of the government's revamped hurricane response capabilities since Katrina.

"What I look for is to determine whether or not assets are in place to help, whether or not there's coordination and whether or not there's preparation for recovery. So to that end, I feel good," Bush said at an emergency operations center in Austin.

Bush praised the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents who heeded warnings and left their homes before Gustav hit, and thanked the states that had taken them in.

"It's been a huge evacuation," he said.

Determined to avoid past mistakes, Bush had quickly ordered top officials to the region, trying to erase memories of the sluggish Katrina response symbolized by his oft-ridiculed remark to then-disaster chief Michael Brown: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Brown was later relieved of his job.

Bush canceled plans to travel to St. Paul to headline the opening of the Republican convention, and then took the unusual step of heading for sites near the storm zone even before Gustav had made landfall.

He had been widely criticized for taking too long to visit New Orleans after Katrina hit three years ago, and his administration was accused of bungling the initial response by taking days to evacuate stranded residents.

(Writing by Matt Spetalnick, editing by David Alexander and David Wiessler)

    With Gustav, Bush tries to avoid Katrina mistakes, R, 1.9.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN3151756920080901

http://www.nola.com/t-p/pdf/090108/A1.pdf

HUNKERING DOWN

Monday, September 01, 2008
The Times Picayune
By John Pope
Staff writer

--- WEAKER GUSTAV MIGHT GIVE METRO AREA BREATHING ROOM ---

--- Storm turns farther toward Lafourche, Terrebone parishes ---

As Hurricane Gustav sped up its drive toward the Louisiana coast on Sunday, residents trying to escape its Category 3 fury crept out of town along interstate highways and officials hunkered down to await the storm's onslaught.

By nightfall, Gustav was moving swiftly to the northwest over the Gulf of Mexico, and a hurricane warning was extended from the Florida-Alabama border to a point just east of High Island, Texas. The warning encompassed the entire coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The storm, which was expected to hit somewhere along the central Louisiana coast today about noon, was moving at 18 mph, although that speed was expected to decrease.

In the meantime, , motorists stuck in contraflow could do little more than crawl. One frustrated woman reported that she had driven 61 miles in six hours on Interstate 59.

Worse yet, there were few opportunities to break out of the snail's-pace procession. In Picayune, Miss., some drivers took a break at a service station, even though it had run out of gasoline.

"It was just so slow," Inga Boudreaux said, "but you've got to be glad people are leaving because the storms are so scary, and we've been through so much."

Boudreaux, who hit the road after preparing her home in Chauvin for the storm, was waiting for a cousin to ride out the storm.

As many as 1.9 million people fled south Louisiana, according to Gov. Bobby Jindal's office.

In New Orleans, the program designed to ferry thousands of people to safety was a success, said Jerry Sneed, the city's director of homeland security and emergency preparedness. The only snag was a faulty computer system, designed to keep track of travelers and buses, that didn't move swiftly enough, he said.

More than 18,000 people took advantage of the free program, which used public buses to shuttle people from 17 sites around the city to the Union Passenger Terminal for rides by bus or train to shelters in north Louisiana and Tennessee.

Federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who held a closed-door meeting with Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday afternoon, "thought we had done a great job," Sneed said. "Word got out, and our citizens listened."

Some of those words came from Nagin, who, in an inflammatory news conference late Saturday night, called Gustav "the mother of all storms" and "the storm of the century" and told viewers to "get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now."


--- Thousands fly out of city ---

By late Sunday afternoon, New Orleans looked "like a graveyard," Sneed said.

Among those fleeing were 25,500 people who flew out Saturday and Sunday before service at Louis Armstrong International Airport stopped Sunday at 6 p.m., said Jon Allen, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, which brought in 275 security officers from around the country to handle the extra traffic.

On Saturday, 17,000 people boarded flights. That total was 2,000 fewer than the number that flew out in January after the national college football championship, which had been the airport's biggest travel day since Hurricane Katrina.

As of noon, Jindal said 84 of 115 nursing homes had been evacuated or were being evacuated. He said the state is also helping to evacuate hospitals.

At a late-afternoon news conference, Jindal said there were three unconfirmed reports of deaths of elderly hospital patients, two in Lake Charles and one in New Orleans. Although names were not available, Jindal said all were critical-care patients and one had a "do not resuscitate" order on her chart.

In the LSU-run Charity Hospital system, 120 patients were safely evacuated from hospitals in harm's way -- in New Orleans, Bogalusa, Houma, Lafayette and Lake Charles -- to hospitals north of I-10, system spokesman Marvin McGraw said.


--- Obama weighs in ---

Among those encouraging evacuation was Sen. Barack Obama, who voiced that sentiment during a Sunday morning call to WDSU-TV, New Orleans' NBC affiliate.

"Please take seriously the warnings of the officials on the ground," the Democrats' presidential nominee said. "This is a serious situation."

The way that state and local officials were handling evacuations, especially by providing transportation for people who had none, seemed to be much more effective than it was three years ago, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit within weeks of each other, Obama said.

In addition to providing swift relief after the storm, Obama said he would assign priority to restoring Louisiana's fragile coastline and building a levee system that could withstand a Category 5 storm.

Obama, who pointed out that he had taken that position after Katrina, said, "This is something that should go beyond politics. Republicans and Democrats and Independents should realize that New Orleans and the coastal regions of Louisiana are embedded in who we are and are an important part of this country."

The Democrats nominated Obama in their convention last week; the Republicans' convention in St. Paul, Minn., scheduled to start today, plans to cut back on anything that might seem frivolous in deference to people along the Gulf Coast who are struggling against nature's violence.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Jindal canceled their trips to Minnesota, and the campaign organization of Sen. John McCain chartered a plane to Jackson, Miss., for delegates who want to fly home. The return flight was to take family members out of Gustav's target area who want to be with their families in St. Paul.


--- The vigil continues ---

Meanwhile, officials throughout the region kept up their grim vigil in areas that were bare of any pedestrian or vehicular activity.

"Pretty much now it's, sit and wait," St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis said.

Because St. Tammany could see storm surges as high as 20 feet, Davis on Saturday night ordered an evacuation for all residents living south of I-12 and east of I-59, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew is to take effect today.

Kenner Mayor Ed Muniz said most citizens of his Jefferson Parish municipality were nervous after hearing Nagin describe Gustav as "the mother of all hurricanes."

But Tommy Philips fired up a grill in the backyard of his parents' Kenner home. While admitting to some apprehension, he said, "If it's my time, it's my time."

St. Bernard Parish, which drowned in Katrina-related floods, seemed deserted Sunday afternoon.

Even though the parish's problems were caused by flooding, parish spokesman William McCartney said any storm surge, followed by days of downpours, could prove to be a lethal combination.

"The comforting thing in all of this is that we have a plan and we're executing it," he said.

Neighboring Plaquemines Parish, which extends into the Gulf and may be the first part of Louisiana to feel Gustav's wrath, was locked down Sunday at 6 p.m., and deputies were pulled out of harm's way, said Maj. John Marie, deputy chief of operations for the parish Sheriff's Office.

Deputies and Belle Chasse City Council members have been encouraging holdouts to evacuate, he said.

One who needed no such urging was Laura Crochet, who lives in Montegut, a Terrebonne Parish community that may well be in Gustav's path today.

She left Sunday morning to drive about 120 miles to be with relatives in Denham Springs.

For Crochet, who lives in Bayou Terrebonne, it was routine.

"When there's a storm coming, you pick up your stuff, you board up your house," she said. "The last thing you do is fill up the boat with gas and leave it in front of the house with the keys in it in case somebody needs it."

Along the bayou, "you tend to have a little different perspective on these things," Crochet said. "It's a different way of looking at the world. You don't panic. You do what you have to do, and you know that it's just stuff."
 

Staff writers Jeff Adelson, Ed Anderson, Jen DeGregorio, Kia Hall Hayes, Michelle Krupa, Kate Moran, Richard Rainey, Paul Rioux, Andrew Vanacore and Jaquetta White, and The Associated Press, contributed to this article.

    HUNKERING DOWN, TsP, 1.9.2008, http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1220246484171980.xml&coll=1

2 Million Flee Storm;

G.O.P. Cuts Back

September 1, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly two million people from Texas to Alabama fled the Gulf Coast on Sunday ahead of Hurricane Gustav, anticipating a storm that could rival Hurricane Katrina in its destructive power.

New Orleans was largely emptied of its residents after a mandatory evacuation order, and interstate highways across the region were jammed bumper to bumper in one of the largest evacuations in American history.

With memories of the shaky response to Hurricane Katrina fresh, officials from President Bush on down were on high alert; Mr. Bush himself described the preparations and warned residents to get out of the storm’s way.

For the most part, the evacuation appeared to go smoothly, particularly the official efforts to get the poor, elderly and infirm out of New Orleans, Port Arthur, Tex., and other cities that could be in the storm’s path. There was no sign that the disaster of 2005 — when thousands were left stranded in misery for days and 1,600 people were killed, many of them elderly — would be repeated.

Hurricane Gustav, a Category 3 storm on the scale of 1 to 5, barreled toward the central Louisiana coast on Sunday night with winds of 115 miles an hour. It was expected to strengthen before it hit as early as Monday morning. Officials predicted devastation for towns in its path, tidal surges of up to 14 feet and possible destruction of parts of New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

Even before it hit, the storm claimed its first three Louisiana victims, at least indirectly. Gov. Bobby Jindal said there were reports that three critical-care patients had died during the evacuation of hospitals throughout New Orleans. Mr. Jindal said one of the patients had a do-not-resuscitate order.

Their deaths occurred during the transfer of patients from more than 8,000 nursing homes and at least 27 hospitals to medical facilities in other cities, including Oklahoma City, which has accepted 150 patients from southwestern Louisiana, Mr. Jindal said. A total of seven states have taken in more than 29,000 residents at 107 shelters, he said.

In Mississippi, the National Guard went door to door trying to roust residents who were still living in trailers after Hurricane Katrina. And in coastal Texas, hundreds of vulnerable residents were flown inland and thousands of others left by car.

Louisiana sent about 18,000 of its poorest residents by bus and train from New Orleans to cities upstate and to Memphis. They were among 1.9 million who left the Louisiana coast.

Mr. Jindal said it was the first time evacuation orders had been issued for both southwestern and southeastern Louisiana. Parts of coastal Alabama were under an evacuation order as well.

Landfall was predicted for an area 100 miles west of the city, with hurricane-force winds of 74 miles per hour or higher, extending out 70 miles. But weather officials warned that because of the size of Hurricane Gustav, areas well away from the center would be affected, including New Orleans, which could see several hours of tropical-storm-force winds of over 70 m.p.h.

New Orleans neighborhoods on the west side of the Mississippi River, closest to the storm’s center, were thought to be particularly vulnerable to a tidal surge coming through the marshes because the levee system is far less complete than in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, on the other side of the river. Once again, the historic neighborhoods along the east bank — the French Quarter, the Garden District and the Marigny — were thought to be relatively safe.

The storm weakened after a destructive passage through the Caribbean in which 81 people were killed. But officials warned residents not to let their guard down.

“This is still a big, ugly storm,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said Sunday morning. “It’s still strong, and I strongly encourage everyone to leave.”

Most seemed to have heeded his words. By midday Sunday, only around 10,000 people were left, the mayor said, out of a population of 250,000 to 300,000. Up to 95 percent of the residents of coastal Louisiana had fled, the State Police said.

Mr. Nagin used far stronger language than forecasters did to describe the storm, saying, “You need to be scared.” And his words appeared to have had the desired effect.

By late Sunday afternoon, the sky had darkened here and tell-tale breezes had begun to blow through the eerily deserted streets.

There was no traffic, no pedestrians and no open stores or restaurants. Windows were shuttered and boarded everywhere. Overnight, this city had been largely emptied of its population. Mr. Nagin said a curfew would be in effect by Sunday evening, with anyone outside subject to arrest.

Evidently intending to forestall the looting rampant after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Nagin promised lawbreakers a quick trip to the state’s notorious penitentiary, Angola.

“We have double the police force, double the National Guard force that we had for Katrina,” the mayor said, “and looters will go directly to jail.”

It was not clear, however, how he planned to bypass the state’s usual law enforcement procedures.

Interstate highways were turned into one-way exit routes out of town, jammed with traffic on I-55 north to Mississippi and I-10 east toward the Gulf Coast but away from the storm’s westerly path. The police had erected barriers blocking entrance into the city, and on the streets National Guard vehicles had begun to patrol.

Those who were left held their breath, hoping that Hurricane Gustav was not Hurricane Katrina’s brother and that the city would be spared.

In the one area partly resisting the mayor’s order — the Uptown neighborhood, which did not flood during Hurricane Katrina — a few diehards were hunkering down, anticipating days without electricity. They had stockpiled gasoline, water and, in some cases, guns.

“Nobody wants to leave,” said Jim Forly, a computer technician, standing on Chestnut Street. His brother David, a scooter mechanic, was wearing a pistol on his belt.

“You just have to get over the hype,” Jim Forly said. His whole family was staying. “We’ll know by Tuesday if it was worth it.” Others in the neighborhood said they, too, had guns at the ready.

In Mississippi, about 3,000 people had reached shelters throughout the state by Sunday afternoon, said Greg Flynn, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Mr. Flynn estimated that about a third of Harrison County, just under 50,000 people, had been asked to leave the area south of Interstate 10 around Gulfport voluntarily or with mandatory evacuation orders.

Most seemed to be going. By 4 p.m., plywood covered the windows of nearly every business along the main road north from the coast, from Jack and Diane’s Tattoos to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and most side streets were quiet. At one of the last fast-food restaurants still open, a half-dozen people said they were just picking up some food on the way out of town.

Texas authorities evacuated about 7,000 people from a three-county area around Beaumont, officials said.

Several hundred elderly and infirm people were flown on Air Force cargo planes to Fort Worth, and buses chartered by the state carried thousands of evacuees to cities like San Antonio, far from where the storm was expected to make landfall.

In Port Arthur, a refinery town of 57,000 people on the Texas-Louisiana border, the streets were largely deserted, and most businesses were boarded up in response to the state’s order to evacuate. A few people who intended to ride out the storm stopped at gas stations and convenience stores to stock up on water, canned goods, cigarettes and beer.

“The public heeded the warning,” said Chief Mark Blanton of the Port Arthur Police Department. “Last time, we were still fighting people who didn’t heed warnings.”

More than 900 people showed up at the Robert A. “Bob” Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur, where national guardsmen loaded them onto buses commissioned by the state. The center was full of elderly and infirm people, some of whom had been waiting for more than eight hours for a bus.

But Roosevelt Scott, 73, a retired truck driver, said he would rather stick out the storm in his house than spend hours on the highway, as he did during Hurricane Rita, which struck right after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mr. Scott had stocked up on $150 worth of frozen meat and bought a generator to keep the electricity going, he said. He was not going to run this time.

“Where you going to hide from God?” he said as he walked into a convenience store. “How you going to hide from him?

“There is a time to be born and a time to die. If he calls your name, you got to answer.”

Still, it was Louisiana that was expected to bear the brunt of the storm, and officials there hoped that the still-incomplete flood control system built after Hurricane Katrina would do its job. At the most vulnerable points in New Orleans — the canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain that spilled over so disastrously during Hurricane Katrina — Army Corps of Engineers officials expressed confidence that they would hold for Hurricane Gustav.

At the gate structure on the city’s London Avenue canal, intended to block the surging waters from the lake during a storm, officials told reporters Sunday that the New Orleans hurricane protection system was stronger than it was during Hurricane Katrina, though not complete.

“You can’t just build a levee overnight,” said Col. Al Lee, the commander of the New Orleans district for the corps. But the repairs and upgrades that have been done, he said, have toughened the levees and made them less likely to fail even if water flows over the top.

Billions of dollars have been spent to shore up the region’s defenses, and gates and pumps like the structure at the London canal can protect more than 14 miles of vulnerable floodwalls that line these drainage canals from taking punishment from rising storm waters. But the higher level of protection designed to withstand serious flooding will not be complete until 2011.

And the picture is even less impressive on the west bank of the river. Some of the levees along a key canal, the Harvey, are just six feet high, and there are still other gaps.

“We are hoping and praying Gustav runs out of steam,” said Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the corps, as lightning flashed in the clouds over Lake Pontchartrain behind him.

Estimates of the storm surge pushed in front of the hurricane have dropped considerably in the past 24 hours, General Van Antwerp said, to 17 feet from as high as 25 feet — a relief, he said, since the newly raised levees that face Lake Borgne along St. Bernard Parish are 19 feet high.

But the storm remained strong, and it was clear by late Sunday that there would at least be far fewer people here for its force than there were for Hurricane Katrina.

“The vast majority of our people have heeded the warnings, have evacuated,” Governor Jindal said. “I think it’s unprecedented, when you see the medical evacuations, the nursing homes, the hospitals, the city- and parish-assisted evacuations.”

Contributing reporting were James C. McKinley Jr. in Port Arthur, Tex.; Damien Cave in Gulfport, Miss.; Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, La.; Anahad O’Connor in New York; and Shaila Dewan, John Schwartz and Kareem Fahim in New Orleans.

    2 Million Flee Storm; G.O.P. Cuts Back, NYT, 1.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/us/01gustav.html?hp

Mayor Orders

the Evacuation of New Orleans

August 31, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS — City officials ordered everyone to leave New Orleans beginning Sunday morning — the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city three years ago — as Hurricane Gustav grew into what the city’s mayor on Saturday called “the storm of the century” and moved toward the Louisiana coast.

The mayor, C. Ray Nagin, said Hurricane Gustav was larger and more dangerous than Hurricane Katrina, and he pleaded with residents to get out or face flooding and life-threatening winds.

“This is the mother of all storms, and I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it,” Mr. Nagin said at an evening news briefing. “This is the real deal. This is not a test. For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.”

The mayor’s warnings were considerably more dramatic than the forecasts issued by the National Hurricane Center, and he may have been exaggerating in order to shock jaded residents into taking prudent steps. But he said storm surges, particularly on the city’s West Bank, could be twice as high as the neighborhood’s 10-foot levees, and said those people choosing to remain in their homes should have an ax to chop through their roofs when the floodwaters rise.

The hurricane could arrive on American shores just as the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin in Minnesota; Senator John McCain of Arizona said the party was considering whether to shorten the gathering or delay it by a few days. Mr. McCain and his choice for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, plan to visit Mississippi on Sunday to see how preparations for the storm are going, a campaign official said.

Bush administration officials took pains not to be caught as flatfooted as they were in Hurricane Katrina, announcing that President Bush had called governors in the region to assure them of assistance and that top federal emergency officials were in the region to guide the response.

Already, hundreds of thousands of residents had begun streaming north from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas stretching from the Florida Panhandle to Houston.

Most left by car, which caused miles of backups on some highways, but New Orleans officials also began a far more carefully planned evacuation of the city’s less mobile residents than took place in 2005. Thousands of city residents began boarding buses and trains ferrying them to shelters in the north.

“I don’t want to be stuck like I was in Katrina,” said Janice McElveen, who was waiting for a bus in the Irish Channel section, recalling being stranded on the Interstate 10 bridge for five days in 2005.

In the Central City section, families, elderly people and the visibly infirm — those with wheelchairs and canes — lined the sidewalk along Dryades Street for half a long block, waiting for a bus. “After going through Katrina, that ain’t no joke,” said Jody Anderson, an unemployed former cashier, who spent seven days in the fetid conditions of the Superdome after that storm. “It’s not worth it, trying to stay.”

The storm strengthened on Saturday into a Category 4 hurricane with winds of up to 145 miles per hour as it moved over Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Forecasters said the hurricane was most likely to strike the Gulf Coast on Monday. New Orleans could get winds of up to 73 m.p.h. and possibly greater.

Forecasters said Hurricane Gustav could become a Category 5 storm, the strongest designation on the scale.

In a mandatory evacuation, residents are not physically forced to leave, but are subject to arrest outside their houses if a curfew is imposed. Mr. Nagin also warned that anyone who chose to stay would not be able to rely on public agencies for emergency assistance.

The political impact of the approaching storm was already being felt. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced they would not attend the Republican National Convention and would remain in their states during the storm.

In Washington, White House officials were considering whether to reschedule Mr. Bush’s trip to the convention, where he is set to speak on Monday.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in an interview taped for “Fox News Sunday,” said the convention program might be reduced or suspended for a day or two if the storm turned out to be destructive.

New Orleans officials estimated that 30,000 people might need the bus and train service to evacuate. Amtrak trains carried thousands of people to Memphis, and buses with thousands of passengers had left the city by Saturday afternoon for shelters in Alexandria, Shreveport and other northern Louisiana locations.

Jackie Clarkson, the president of the City Council, said the evacuation was proceeding more smoothly than any she had seen before. “We can save everybody this time,” Ms. Clarkson said.

The state police on Saturday reported moderately heavy traffic on a principal highway north, Interstate 55, though local news reports indicated that jams had already formed on some roads.

Dozens of people waited outside for buses at 17 collection points all over New Orleans to take them to the Union Passenger Terminal, the train station downtown. From there they would be taken by bus and train to cities in north Louisiana and to Memphis. They clutched duffle bags, plastic shopping sacks, small children and overstuffed suitcases, vowing to avoid at all costs the still-vivid nightmare of Hurricane Katrina.

The buses arrived promptly at 8 a.m. — a sharp contrast to the disorganization of three years ago, when the only plan was to jam thousands of people without cars into the Superdome and let others fend for themselves.

“I refuse to go through that again,” said Roxanne Clayton, a photo technician at Walgreens, who was waiting in the Irish Channel neighborhood with her teenage son and 10-year-old daughter. Ms. Clayton recalled being stuck in her attic for two days during Hurricane Katrina. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry,” she said, “because I know what sorry feels like.”

A neighbor from the larger houses up Louisiana Avenue brought doughnuts for those patiently waiting, and many said they were simply grateful for the ride out of town.

Officials made an effort to soothe concerns about looting. Mayor Nagin noted that with 1,500 to 2,000 National Guard troops coming to New Orleans, the city would have twice as much law enforcement protection as it had in the days after Hurricane Katrina. In all, 7,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were mobilized Friday.

For residents who were driving out, state officials prepared an elaborate contraflow system, reversing all lanes of several highways so they lead out of southern Louisiana beginning Sunday morning. Officials were staging the plans so that those farthest south could exit first.

In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, warning residents that curfews would be enforced. The parish was one of the hardest hit in Hurricane Katrina, and many of its residents never returned. Similar orders were given in the parishes of Plaquemines, St. Charles and lower Jefferson, southwest of New Orleans.

Hurricane Gustav, which has already killed 81 people in the Caribbean, lashed the western tip of Cuba on Saturday, and The Associated Press reported that 300,000 people were being evacuated from the area. Forecasts of its track said it could strike the United States mainland from the Florida Panhandle on the east to the Texas coast, though the center of the track remained the Louisiana coast west of New Orleans. Whatever its exact landing point, storm surges could cause damage throughout the region.

Mr. Nagin said the storm was now 900 miles wide, compared with 400 miles for Katrina. Even the capital of Baton Rouge, 80 miles inland from New Orleans, could experience hurricane winds of up to 100 m.p.h., he said.

But Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, said he had no idea what the mayor meant by a 900-mile footprint, saying that hurricane force winds do not extend nearly that far.

Mr. Feltgen emphasized the uncertainty of forecasted landfalls. “New Orleans will be impacted, but to what degree we don’t know,” Mr. Feltgen said. If the center of the storm passes more than 60 miles from the city, he added, “they may not expect hurricane force winds.”

That New Orleans will most likely be east of the center, on “the dirty side of the storm,” means large amounts of rain. In addition, Mr. Feltgen said, there is “potential for a significant storm surge;

we don’t know how much, or where.”

A Louisiana State University scientist who has been tracking the storm said the area at greatest risk, under present forecasts, was not New Orleans but the low-population district between Houma and Lafayette on the state’s south-central coast. “It’s just like Rita; it’s more of a rural storm than an urban storm,” said Robert Twilley, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences.

Experts say that the New Orleans hurricane defenses have been strengthened significantly since the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina but that the city is still not yet ready to take the punch from a major hurricane.

“The system itself is stronger than it was before Katrina,” said Maj. Timothy J. Kurgan, the chief of the public affairs office for the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. He acknowledged, however, that the defenses that the corps has been designing and putting into place to withstand what is known as 100-year flooding are under construction and are only 20 percent complete.

While some $2 billion has been spent so far to patch and upgrade the system, the $13 billion construction program that is designed to bring the city full protection against the kind of flooding that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year is not scheduled to be complete until 2011.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” said Major Kurgan, and “we’ve made great strides. But we’re not there by any stretch of the imagination.”

In particular, floodgates have been constructed at the end of city drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, the principal conduits for the fateful surge during Hurricane Katrina. Still, there is no such arrangement on the Industrial Canal, the surge from which destroyed the still-empty Lower Ninth Ward.

In terms of preparation for Hurricane Gustav, Major Kurgan said, the corps has workers ready to enter its hardened shelters at the floodgates and to respond quickly and in force once the storm has passed. “The Corps of Engineers is ready for this storm,” he said, and will be “able to address whatever this storm brings to us.”

Some institutions — hospitals and nursing homes, where many died during Hurricane Katrina — were taking no chances, already ferrying patients north of the area on Friday.

Michelle Barnes, a French Quarter resident, was nearly in tears, worried that she would not be allowed on the bus with her little dog, Jack, who was resting in a black canvas bag. Evacuees had been instructed to keep their pets in a carrying case, but Ms. Barnes did not have one. “I just hope,” Ms. Barnes said, “because otherwise I won’t leave.”

John Schwartz contributed reporting.

Mayor Orders the Evacuation of New Orleans, NYT, 1.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/us/31orleans.html

Thousands Stream

From New Orleans

Ahead of Storm

September 1, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS — Tens of thousands of residents streamed out of New Orleans on Sunday after heeding orders from officials to evacuate the city — the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city three years ago — as Hurricane Gustav grew into what the city’s mayor called “the storm of the century” and moved toward the Louisiana coast.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Hurricane Gustav was larger and more dangerous than Hurricane Katrina, and he pleaded with residents to get out or face flooding and life-threatening winds.

“We should start to see tornado threats starting tonight and in the morning,” he said at a news briefing Sunday morning. “This is still a big, ugly storm. It’s still strong and I strongly encourage everyone to leave.”

Mr. Nagin said that 14,000 to 15,000 residents had already been evacuated through the bus and train system the city and state set up, and that the number was likely to go up to 18,000 by the time the buses stop rolling later on Sunday. About half the city’s residents have left town and many neighborhoods are empty; Most of the holdouts are in the affluent Uptown neighborhoods that are on higher ground and did not experience flooding during Katrina.

The crush of evacuations took place throughout the night and throughout Sunday and came after Mr. Nagin issued dire warnings that the city could be devastated.

“This is the mother of all storms, and I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it,” he said on Saturday evening. “This is the real deal. This is not a test. For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.”

The mayor’s tone on Sunday was considerably less dramatic than it was Saturday night, when his warnings were stronger than the forecasts issued by the National Hurricane Center. Mr. Nagin may have been exaggerating in order to shock jaded residents into taking prudent steps. But he said storm surges, particularly on the city’s West Bank, could be twice as high as the neighborhood’s 10-foot levees, and said those people choosing to remain in their homes should have an ax to chop through their roofs when the floodwaters rise.

On Sunday, Mr. Nagin announced that he was instituting a curfew from dusk until dawn — when anyone on the street is subject to arrest — that would go into effect at sunset. At one point in his news briefing, apparently hoping to stave off a repeat of the looting that was rampant in the days after Katrina, he issued a direct warning to anyone with plans to linger in New Orleans.

“We have double the police force, double the National Guard force that we had for Katrina, and looters will go directly to jail,” he said. “You will not get a pass this time.”

Then, referring to Angola, the state’s notorious penitentiary, he added: “You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You’ll go directly to the big house.”

The National Hurricane Center said Sunday that the storm had weakened to a Category 3 hurricane with winds of up to 125 miles per hour, but warned that it could pick up strength later in the day, returning to Category 4 speeds of 130 m.p.h. and greater. As of Sunday afternoon, Gustav was churning through the central Gulf of Mexico, situated about 325 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River and headed northwest at 17 m.p.h.

For some time on Saturday, the storm, which has already killed 81 people in the Caribbean, had been classified as a Category 4 hurricane as it moved over Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico.

After pulverizing numerous homes and roads on Isla de la Juventud, a small province just off the coast of Cuba, Gustav moved to the mainland, where it destroyed more homes, knocked out power, and ruined tobacco crops in the province of Pinar del Rio, which produces many of Cuba’s celebrated cigars. Cuban officials told The Associated Press that there were many injuries but no reported deaths.

Forecasters said that the hurricane was most likely to strike the Gulf Coast on Monday, and that New Orleans could get winds of up to 73 m.p.h. and possibly greater. They said Hurricane Gustav could become a Category 5 storm, the strongest designation on the scale.

The hurricane is expected to arrive on American shores just as the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin in Minnesota; Senator John McCain of Arizona said the party was considering whether to shorten the gathering or delay it by a few days. Mr. McCain and his choice for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, plan to visit Mississippi on Sunday to see how preparations for the storm are going, a campaign official said.

On Sunday, President Bush said at a news briefing that he and Vice President Dick Cheney would not attend the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday as scheduled. He said he would be traveling instead to San Antonio, where emergency workers are providing food and shelter to evacuees.

“Several states, including Missouri, Texas and New Mexico, are preparing to and have accepted a lot of evacuees,” he said. “People who are leaving the areas of concern, we’re working hard to be sure they have a place to go.”

All told, millions of residents have been streaming north from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas stretching from the Florida Panhandle to Houston.

Most left by car, which caused miles of backups on some highways, but New Orleans officials also began a far more carefully planned evacuation of the city’s less mobile residents than took place in 2005. Thousands of city residents began boarding buses and trains ferrying them to shelters in the north.

“I don’t want to be stuck like I was in Katrina,” said Janice McElveen, who was waiting for a bus in the Irish Channel section, recalling being stranded on the Interstate 10 bridge for five days in 2005.

In the Central City section, families, elderly people and the visibly infirm — those with wheelchairs and canes — lined the sidewalk along Dryades Street for half a long block, waiting for a bus. “After going through Katrina, that ain’t no joke,” said Jody Anderson, an unemployed former cashier, who spent seven days in the fetid conditions of the Superdome after that storm. “It’s not worth it, trying to stay.”

In a mandatory evacuation, residents are not physically forced to leave, but are subject to arrest outside their houses if a curfew is imposed. Mr. Nagin also warned that anyone who chose to stay would not be able to rely on public agencies for emergency assistance.

The political impact of the approaching storm was already being felt. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced they would not attend the Republican National Convention and would remain in their states during the storm.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in an interview taped for “Fox News Sunday,” said the convention program might be reduced or suspended for a day or two if the storm turned out to be destructive.

New Orleans officials had been preparing on Saturday for at least 30,000 people to use the city bus and train service to evacuate. Amtrak trains carried thousands of people to Memphis, and buses with thousands of passengers had left the city by Saturday afternoon for shelters in Alexandria, Shreveport and other northern Louisiana locations.

Jackie Clarkson, the president of the City Council, said the evacuation was proceeding more smoothly than any she had seen before. “We can save everybody this time,” Ms. Clarkson said.

The state police on Sunday reported moderately heavy traffic on a principal highway north, Interstate 55, though local news reports indicated that jams had already formed on some roads.

Throughout the weekend, dozens of people waited outside for buses at 17 collection points all over New Orleans to take them to the Union Passenger Terminal, the train station downtown. From there they would be taken by bus and train to cities in north Louisiana and to Memphis. They clutched duffle bags, plastic shopping sacks, small children and overstuffed suitcases, vowing to avoid at all costs the still-vivid nightmare of Hurricane Katrina.

The buses arrived promptly at 8 a.m. on Saturday — a sharp contrast to the disorganization of three years ago, when the only plan was to jam thousands of people without cars into the Superdome and let others fend for themselves.

“I refuse to go through that again,” said Roxanne Clayton, a photo technician at Walgreens, who was waiting in the Irish Channel neighborhood with her teenage son and 10-year-old daughter. Ms. Clayton recalled being stuck in her attic for two days during Hurricane Katrina. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry,” she said, “because I know what sorry feels like.”

A neighbor from the larger houses up Louisiana Avenue brought doughnuts for those patiently waiting, and many said they were simply grateful for the ride out of town.

Officials made an effort to soothe concerns about looting. Mayor Nagin noted that with 1,500 to 2,000 National Guard troops coming to New Orleans, the city would have twice as much law enforcement protection as it had in the days after Hurricane Katrina. In all, 7,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were mobilized Friday.

For residents who were driving out, state officials prepared an elaborate contraflow system, reversing all lanes of several highways so they were leading out of southern Louisiana beginning Sunday morning. Officials were staging the plans so that those farthest south could exit first.

In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, warning residents that curfews would be enforced. The parish was one of the hardest hit in Hurricane Katrina, and many of its residents never returned. Similar orders were given in the parishes of Plaquemines, St. Charles and lower Jefferson, southwest of New Orleans.

According to forecasters, Gustav is expected to strike the United States mainland from the Florida Panhandle on the east to the Texas coast, though the center of the track remained the Louisiana coast west of New Orleans. Whatever its exact landing point, storm surges could cause damage throughout the region.

A Louisiana State University scientist who has been tracking the storm said the area at greatest risk, under present forecasts, was not New Orleans but the low-population district between Houma and Lafayette on the state’s south-central coast. “It’s just like Rita; it’s more of a rural storm than an urban storm,” said Robert Twilley, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences.

Experts say that the New Orleans hurricane defenses have been strengthened significantly since the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina but that the city is still not yet ready to take the punch from a major hurricane.

“The system itself is stronger than it was before Katrina,” said Maj. Timothy J. Kurgan, the chief of the public affairs office for the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. He acknowledged, however, that the defenses that the corps has been designing and putting into place to withstand what is known as 100-year flooding are under construction and are only 20 percent complete.

While some $2 billion has been spent so far to patch and upgrade the system, the $13 billion construction program that is designed to bring the city full protection against the kind of flooding that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year is not scheduled to be complete until 2011.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” said Major Kurgan, and “we’ve made great strides. But we’re not there by any stretch of the imagination.”

In particular, floodgates have been constructed at the end of city drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, the principal conduits for the fateful surge during Hurricane Katrina. Still, there is no such arrangement on the Industrial Canal, the surge from which destroyed the still-empty Lower Ninth Ward.

In terms of preparation for Hurricane Gustav, Major Kurgan said, the corps has workers ready to enter its hardened shelters at the floodgates and to respond quickly and in force once the storm has passed. “The Corps of Engineers is ready for this storm,” he said, and will be “able to address whatever this storm brings to us.”

Some institutions — hospitals and nursing homes, where many died during Hurricane Katrina — were taking no chances, already ferrying patients north of the area on Friday.

By midday on Sunday, the streets of downtown New Orleans and many other neighborhoods were completely deserted. Although the lights were on in about half the Garden District Saturday night, there were few people out in the streets in those areas, and few cars.

The city was taking no chances: a large sheriff’s department power boat was parked right outside of City Hall.

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting from New York.

Thousands Stream From New Orleans Ahead of Storm, NYT, 1.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/us/01gustav.html