History > 2008 > USA > Nature, Weather, Climate (IV)

Traffic snaked up a road

as residents evacuated their homes as strong Santa Ana winds

swept into Southern California early Monday,

sparking embers that left a trail of full-scale wildfires.

Photograph: Dan Steinberg

Associated Press

Wildfires Force Evacuations in L.A.

NYT

14 October 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/14fire.html

In Maryland,

Focus on Poultry

Industry Pollution

November 29, 2008
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

WILLARDS, Md. — Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee Richardson pondered how times had changed.

“When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”

How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store it in outdoor piles.

“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open lands,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland who is a former state senator. “So why should we allow a farm with 150,000 chickens do it?”

As the amount of cropland in Maryland has shrunk and the number of chickens raised has grown to 570 million, these mountains of manure have become a liability because the excess is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation’s most polluted estuaries, and further worsening the plight of the fishermen who ply its waters.

But the chicken farmers say that they are already doing their part to protect the environment and that the proposed regulations come as the industry is reeling from record-high energy and feed prices.

“This will absolutely kill anyone coming into the poultry industry,” Kenny Bounds, a government affairs officer for Mid-Atlantic Farm Credit, said at one of three public hearings in the last month, where farmers objected to the regulations and said they might push some growers out of the state.

The poultry industry in Maryland, the state’s most lucrative form of agriculture and one of its largest employers, has expanded to feed the nation’s growing hunger for cheap chicken.

The lower prices, however, are possible only from huge economies of scale. And the bigger the farms, the more birds and the more manure there are to handle.

State officials have started to realize that there are consequences to being able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Mr. Winegrad said.

Environmentalists and state officials have also become frustrated that after more than a decade of spending over $100 million a year in state money on restoration efforts, the Chesapeake, unlike most other mid-Atlantic waterways, has only grown more polluted.

As the phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the bay have grown, so have the algae that deplete oxygen needed by other aquatic life.

In the past two decades, working oystermen on the bay have dropped to less than 500, from 6,000. The crab population has fallen by 70 percent.

“A lot of chicken farmers are already doing the right thing when it comes to pollution,” said Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, adding that he thought the poultry regulations would be a step in the right direction. “But there needs to be more done to make sure that everyone does the right thing.”

Under the state’s proposed rules, 75 to 100 of the 800 largest poultry farmers in Maryland would have to apply for permits to handle manure. State officials would also begin inspecting these farms unannounced and levying heavy fines if violations are not eventually corrected. The rules would not affect smaller farms.

Michele Merkel, a lawyer with the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, said the permits did not go far enough. Too few farms would be required to have them, Ms. Merkel said, and they allow farmers to pile the waste in their fields open to the rain for 90 days, while most other states permit it to be uncovered for only 14 days.

Maryland is most famous for its blue crabs, oysters and watermen, so it has a lot to lose from polluting these waters, Ms. Merkel said.

“That’s exactly why it’s never made sense to me,” she said, “that the state is so unwilling to really regulate one of the bay’s biggest polluters.”

The economic might of the poultry industry is certainly part of the reason.

Concentrated in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester Counties along the Eastern Shore, the industry contributes more than $700 million annually to the Maryland economy.

For every job added on a chicken farm, seven related jobs are created in slaughterhouses, construction and trucking, according to industry estimates.

Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.

Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch the length of the houses.

Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads, and three quarters of the state’s crop go toward feeding the birds.

Gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.

Under the proposed regulations, chicken growers would be required to maintain a 35-foot-wide filter strip of vegetation along streams and ditches, or not to apply manure within 50 feet of streams or 10 feet of ditches, and they would be required to keep manure piles more than 100 feet from streams. The permits would also assess fines of up to $32,500 per day if farmers did not correct problems after being told to do so.

The liability for the manure would fall to the growers who raise the chickens, rather than the larger companies that own the birds, provide the feed and drop off a new batch of chicks every eight weeks.

Bill Satterfield, director of the local poultry trade association, Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., said the farmers were an important engine for the state’s economic well-being.

“We’re also already doing our part when it comes to the environment,” Mr. Satterfield said.

Farmers already work to plant trees and environmental buffers around chicken houses and feed the birds an ingredient to cut down on the phosphorous in their manure. They also recycle some of their manure in the world’s largest chicken manure recycling plant, which produces organic fertilizer pellets that can be shipped elsewhere.

Storm runoff from urban areas, lawn fertilizers and pollution from cars and sewage treatment plants also play major roles in polluting the bay. But Environmental Protection Agency officials say that agriculture is the largest single source of pollutants and sediment in the Chesapeake Bay, accounting for over 40 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorous and over 70 percent of the sediment.

State officials say that animal manure produces more phosphorus and nearly the same amount of nitrogen pollution as all human wastewater from treatment plants in the state.

Although the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound. Reducing pollution from agriculture is also about a tenth as costly as it is to achieve the same reductions from urban development, state and federal environmental officials say.

“The reason to focus on poultry,” said Tom Simpson, executive director of Water Stewardship, an environmental nonprofit agency, “is that sewage treatment plants have already been required to reduce their pollution and storm water runoff from cities and large dairy and hog farms have permits that can be used to limit their water pollution.”

But in the past two decades, the poultry industry has carved a special role for itself in terms of the oversight it receives, and it has twice defeated state efforts to impose permits.

Maryland is one of the only states where the poultry industry is regulated by the State Department of Agriculture, whose primary mission is helping farmers, and not by the State Department of the Environment, which is charged with enforcing pollution laws.

Most other states with large poultry farms already require the permits and regular inspections.

In Maryland, however, chicken farmers have only had to file nutrient management plans with state agriculture officials, describing how they control their chicken waste each year.

These documents are not public. The guidelines for manure storage are optional, and the fine for not filing a plan is $350.

Standing in front of his pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “It’s not farmland without farmers,” Mr. Richardson shook his head in frustration.

“As far as I can tell, the current system works fine except a few bad apples,” he said. “What they are proposing now is just more cost for us growers and more time doing paperwork.”

In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution, NYT, 29.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/us/29poultry.html

A Land Rush in Wyoming

Spurred by Wind Power

November 28, 2008
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

WHEATLAND, Wyo. — The man who came to Elsie Bacon’s ranch house door in July asked the 71-year-old widow to grant access to a right of way across the dry hills and short grasses of her land here. Ms. Bacon remembered his insistence on a quick, secret deal.

The man, a representative of the Little Rose Wind Farm of Boulder, Colo., sought an easement for a transmission line to carry his company’s wind-generated electricity to market. His offer: a fraction of the value of similar deals in the area. As Ms. Bacon, 71, recalled it: “He said, ‘You sure I can’t write you out a check?’ He was really pushy.”

A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.

But as developers descend upon the area, drawing comparisons to the oil patch “land men” in the movie “There Will Be Blood,” the ranchers of Albany, Converse and Platte Counties are rewriting the old script.

Ms. Bacon did not agree to the deal from the Little Rose representative, Ed Ahlstrand Jr. Instead, she joined her neighbors in forming the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association — among the new cooperative associations whose members, in a departure from the local culture of privacy and self-reliance, are pooling their wind-rich land.

This allows them to bargain collectively for a better price and ensures that as few as possible succumb to high-pressure tactics or accept low offers. Ranchers share information about the potential value of their wind.

The development of eight Wyoming wind associations (with three more waiting in the wings) and similar groups in Colorado, Montana and New Mexico has not always been a simple matter. While ranchers have always been ready to help their neighbors, they have been less willing to discuss their financial affairs.

That has made it easier for wind developers to make individual deals and insist that the terms be kept secret. The developers’ cause has not been hurt by a 10-year drought’s impact on agricultural families’ finances.

Gregor Goertz heads the Slater Wind Energy Association, one of the oldest although less than two years old, formed by dozens of independent-minded men and women. “Maybe they wouldn’t talk to each other often about other issues,” he said, “but here they could see a common goal.”

Mr. Goertz added that, of the 45 or more landowners who came to his first meeting, just one declined to join. The group’s land holdings, which total about 30,000 acres, are centered on a row of buttes where the wind routinely blows at 25 miles per hour.

Mr. Goertz said that because of the changes a forest of turbines would make in the serrated, far-flung vistas here, “everybody in the community is going to be affected.” The association, he said, would “assure that everybody will have some income whether they have a turbine placed on their property or not.”

The developers hope to supply Wyoming wind power to markets like California, which intends to have one-third of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

“This is the best wind in North America, we think,” said Ronald Lehr, a representative of the American Wind Energy Association, the developers’ trade group.

Of course, the decline in oil prices and the constraints on the capital markets are most likely to slow the development of wind energy. But for ranchers, the calculations remain the same about whether to deal with developers individually or as a group.

Bob Grant, 82, a rancher who sleeps in the bed his Scottish grandfather brought across the ocean and the prairie a century ago, has never liked the wind here. Mr. Grant has seen it hurl gravel off ridges and into a friend’s face like shrapnel.

He said he warmed to the idea of wind associations after long, individual negotiations with enXco, a French-owned developer.

In early 2007, the centerpiece of the price discussed was a per-acre payment of about $2.50, Mr. Grant and an enXco representative said. Discussions broke off, then resumed a year later; the suggested price per acre has nearly doubled.

The doubling of the offer made Mr. Grant and his sons wonder how they could assess, and trust, any offer, they said.

Greg Probst, a representative of enXco, said the first offer had not been an effort to drive a hard bargain. It was, Mr. Probst said, a realistic appraisal, given the difficulties of transporting wind power to market when there was little transmission capacity to spare.

From early 2007 to late 2008, he said, the potential marketability of wind power in southeastern Wyoming was enhanced as plans for construction of the Wyoming-Colorado Intertie, a privately financed transmission line, became firmer and Xcel Energy showed an interest in buying the renewable energy.

“There’s a better chance that there’s a market for the power, and a way to get the power to market, than there was 18 months or two years ago,” Mr. Probst said. “So we’re definitely willing to pay more at this point.”

But the experience made the Grant family look harder at the possibility of joining their lands with those of their neighbors in a new group, the Bordeaux Wind Energy Association, which sent its incorporation papers to the state just before Thanksgiving.

The godfather of such associations is a federal official, Grant Stumbough, whose work for the Resource Conservation and Development office of the Agriculture Department was focused on ways to keep ranchers on the land. Revenue from wind farms, he believed, could mean the difference between success and failure for some ranchers.

Mr. Stumbough felt the ranchers were at a disadvantage when dealing individually with wind developers. The developers, in most cases, know more than landowners about the value of the wind and the transmission lines that will carry it.

For instance, the deal that Mr. Ahlstrand offered Elsie Bacon was valued, yard for yard, at as little as a quarter of the amount that the largest local electrical cooperative had paid for a large transmission right of way. And it included a nondisclosure clause to prevent her from comparing notes with neighbors.

(Mr. Ahlstrand did not respond to repeated telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking his version of these events.)

Mr. Stumbough said: “I thought we could use collective bargaining strategies to maybe have a little more leverage in negotiating with wind developers. If we could all get together and work together cooperatively and do some cost sharing and maybe share some of the profits, I think it’s going to be a benefit to everybody.”

The idea has quickly spread. Aside from the promise of economic dividends, which may make it easier to stay on the land, ranchers are finding other less tangible benefits to the groups.

Larry Cundall, a rancher in Glendo who heads the Glendo Wind Energy Association, said the organizational meeting in April attracted 126 people, some from 60 miles away. It had, Mr. Cundall said, “the feeling of an old country dance.”

“Afterward,” he went on, “everyone stood around and visited like we did before we had TV.”

The initial reaction, Mr. Cundall said, had been “90 percent positive,” although he admitted there was skepticism. “Everyone takes everything with a grain of salt around here,” he said.

The associations send out requests to wind developers who may be interested in constructing a wind farm; Mr. Goertz’s Slater Association, the first one formed, gave tours of their lands to at least a dozen different developers, Mr. Goertz said, and are in the final stages of making a deal.

Asked if the terms of the impending deal were better than those offered to some of the ranchers originally, Mr. Goertz said simply, “Yes.”

The financial arrangements of each association are unique, but in the case of the Slater Wind Energy Association, 55 percent of the total annual royalties is to be distributed among the landowners who have turbines on their properties. The rest is to be distributed among all association members, both those with turbines and those without.

Jim Anderson, the state senator whose district covers the windy acres of this region, welcomes the rise of these associations as vehicles to market their wind and as bargainers with the leverage to get ranchers a good deal. “I think the word is kind of out,” Mr. Anderson said, “that Wyoming is probably ahead of the curve in regard to those people who might be opportunist and want to come in and take advantage” of local ranchers.

“I think that we’ve positioned ourselves well to be prudent and intelligent negotiators.”

    A Land Rush in Wyoming Spurred by Wind Power, NYT, 28.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28wind.html?hp

Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

November 20, 2008
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this long time staple of science fiction were a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years. Though the stuffed animals in natural history museums are not likely to burst into life again, these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA which can be decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines.

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are now discussions of how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that generation by generation it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but ethically more challenging.

A scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University report in today’s issue of Nature that they have recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair. Mammoths were driven to extinction toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, after the first modern humans learned how to survive and hunt in the steppes of Siberia.

Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller said there was no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome, which they believe could be achieved for a further $2 million. They have already been able to calculate that the mammoth’s genes differ at around 400,000 sites on its genome from that of the African elephant.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-sized chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a short-cut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million.

Such a project would have been judged entirely impossible a few years ago and is far from reality even now. Still, several technical barriers have fallen in surprising ways. One is that ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze. But a new generation of DNA decoding machines uses tiny pieces as their starting point. Dr. Schuster’s laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000.

Another problem has been that ancient DNA in bone, the usual source, is heavily contaminated with bacterial DNA. Dr. Schuster has found that hair is a much purer source of the host’s DNA, with the keratin serving to seal it in and largely exclude bacteria.

A third issue is that the DNA of living cells can be modified, but only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time. Dr. Schuster said he had been in discussion with George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time.

The method has not yet been published and until other scientists can assess it they are likely to view genome engineering on such a scale as being implausible. Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the proposal to resurrect a mammoth was “a wishful thinking experiment with no realistic chance for success.”

Dr. Church, however, said there had recently been enormous technical improvements in decoding genomes and that he expected similar improvements in genome engineering. In his new method, some 50,000 corrective DNA sequences are injected into a cell at one time. The cell would then be tested and subjected to further rounds of DNA modification until judged close enough to that of the ancient species.

In the case of resurrecting the mammoth, Dr. Church said, the process would begin by taking a skin cell from an elephant and converting it to the embryonic state with a method developed last year by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for reprogramming cells.

Asked if the mammoth project might indeed happen, Dr. Church said that “there is some enthusiasm for it,” although making zoos better did not outrank fixing the energy crisis on his priority list.

Dr. Schuster believes that museums could prove goldmines of ancient DNA because any animal remains containing keratin, from hooves to feathers, could hold enough DNA for the full genome to be recovered by the new sequencing machines.

The full genome of the Neanderthals, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals.

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.

    Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million, NYT, 20.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?hp

Homeless in a Flash,

Hundreds in Texas

Now Wait for Relief

November 19, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR

BRIDGE CITY, Tex. — After Hurricane Ike flooded her house, Terri Reeves could not wait for the federal government to provide her with housing, so she spent all her savings — about $8,000 — on a camper to live in on her front lawn.

Now, she has watched wistfully as the Federal Emergency Management Agency has installed several mobile homes on her block for other people with flood-damaged homes.

“They keep telling me one day I’m on the list, and the next day I’m not on the list,” Ms. Reeves said, holding her Yorkie, Rufus, in the gutted ruins of her house. “They give you the runaround.”

Since the storm hit on Sept. 13, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has installed about 1,000 mobile homes in some of the hardest-hit areas, almost all alongside ruined homes. Another 400 have been delivered but are not ready to be occupied, either because they lack utilities or have not been inspected. But at least 1,500 families are still waiting for units to arrive, agency officials said.

Sandy Coachman, the federal coordinating officer for Hurricane Ike, acknowledged that local ordinances and bureaucratic tangles had slowed the mobile home program. But given the complexity of installing hundreds of units on private lots, Ms. Coachman contended that the pace had been rapid.

“These challenges just take time and the solutions just take time,” she said.

Some local officials, however, say the government seemed slow off the mark and had only recently started to work efficiently.

“All of a sudden, they are shaking loose,” said Carl Thibideaux, the top official of Orange County, where Bridge City is, “but it’s been a very, very slow process.”

Some communities have yet to receive more than a handful of the mobile homes.

In Oak Island, for instance, a town in Chambers County where 300 houses were destroyed, local officials say only about 30 mobile homes have been delivered, and half have yet to pass final inspections.

The chief executive of Galveston County, Jim Yarbrough, said that about 825 families in his region needed the mobile homes, but that “only a handful” — a total of 43 — had been installed, mostly because of regulations that prohibit putting mobile homes in floodplains and problems meeting environmental standards.

“Sometimes you just have to change the rules and adapt to the environment and situation you are working in,” Mr. Yarbrough said, “and the FEMA system doesn’t have that flexibility. It’s not because they are not trying. It’s just that their red tape is so damn tough.”

Besides the slow pace of installing mobile homes, a federal program to put displaced families in rental apartments for six months has become backed up as well, officials say.

In Harris County, which includes Houston, the emergency management agency has approved about 25,000 people for the subsidized apartments. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been slow to vet those applicants, and so far local housing authorities have placed only 7,700 people in apartments, leaving the rest in limbo.

“They are afraid of being accused of fraud, waste and abuse,” said Buddy Grantham, Houston’s director of disaster housing programs. “It’s dramatically increased the time it takes to move people to the next step.”

One major problem for federal emergency officials has been a lack of rental housing in the hardest-hit parts of East Texas and Galveston Island.

That has forced the government to use mobile homes in coastal towns. But officials said that the small camper-style trailers the emergency management agency used after Hurricane Katrina proved to be unhealthy because high levels of formaldehyde had been used in their construction.

As a result, Ms. Coachman said, the government had opted for larger mobile homes, which take much more work to install, including sewer and electrical hookups.

People are expected to live in the trailers for a year and a half while they rebuild their homes.

While waiting for the mobile homes, most people in the flooded areas have bought their own camping trailers and are living in their driveways. Some are camped out on their lawns in tents or pop-up campers. Renters have been especially hard hit, since they do not qualify for the mobile homes.

John Cobert, 27, a mural painter, and his girlfriend, Christine Carlton, 20, a cocktail waitress, have been living for two months in a two-person tent behind the building where he had rented a room before it was flooded.

Mr. Cobert, who was suffering from bronchitis, said he had tried to persuade federal officials to give him a mobile home or a voucher for an apartment. He said that he was told that the mobile homes were for homeowners, not renters, and that he ran into trouble with the voucher application because he could not produce a bill with his name on it at that address.

“We don’t qualify because we are renters,” he said, pulling a blanket up around his shoulders as he sat in the tent, where he had installed a television with an extension cord to the ruined building. “They say they are going to try to get us an apartment or a hotel, but they are just rude people. I couldn’t find a piece of mail with my name on it. He said, You could be from anywhere.”

Those who have the mobile homes say the bureaucratic hoops they had to jump through were formidable.

Elizabeth Guidry Davis, 52, a homemaker in the city of West Orange, saw that the house she had lived in for three decades had been knocked off its foundations and ruined by floodwaters. The wife of a railroad car mechanic, Ms. Davis had no flood insurance and applied for federal aid the day after the storm.

The government gave her $10,000 to repair the house, but the structural damage was too great, and it would have taken at least $30,000 to rebuild it, she said. Because her lot is small, she was told she would have to raze the house to qualify for a mobile home. So she had her home torn down on Oct. 10, only to find out eight days later that the emergency management agency could not put a mobile home on the lot because it was in a flood zone.

Ms. Davis eventually persuaded the government to waive the restriction. But it was not until November that the mobile home arrived, and it took another week and a half to get it hooked up to utilities and inspected.

Ms. Davis and her husband, Jay, have no idea how they will raise the money to rebuild their home. But they now have a place to live for 18 months, a welcome relief from the last two months of staying with friends.

She said the delay in installing the trailer seemed unnecessary. The emergency management agency should have anticipated the need for the mobile homes earlier, she said.

“What did they think would happen?” Ms. Davis said. “They had all the food and water supplies. The trailers should have been right behind them.”

    Homeless in a Flash, Hundreds in Texas Now Wait for Relief, NYT, 19.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/us/19fema.html

As Winds Quiet Down,

California Fires Are Tamed

November 18, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — Firefighters gained the upper hand on Monday against three blazes raging over a 130-mile stretch of Southern California, as scores of residents picked over the charred remains of their homes and state officials took a new look at how to prevent a recurrence of the destruction.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a review of building standards for manufactured homes after nearly 500 of them went up in flames in the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in the San Fernando Valley over the weekend and the remaining 100 or so in the park were left badly damaged. Mr. Schwarzenegger also called for hospitals to examine their generators after the backup power system failed at a hospital in the center of that fire, north of downtown Los Angeles.

A calming of the Santa Ana winds, which helped propel the three fires that over the course of several days consumed roughly 40,000 acres and hundreds of homes and sent five counties into states of emergency, helped firefighters who were laboring mightily.

In Santa Barbara County, a fire that quickly consumed scores of luxury homes last week was almost completely under control. In the San Fernando Valley, fires were roughly 40 percent contained. In an area south of Los Angeles, fires smoldering across two counties were also about 40 percent controlled.

In all, more than 30 people were injured in the fires, three seriously, with burns and smoke inhalation.

Smoke and ash blanketed much of Los Angeles County, with schools in some areas closed and outdoor activities curtailed because of poor air quality.

Officials in the counties hit by fires said the causes were under investigation, though the Santa Barbara County fire was initially thought to be caused by people.

While California has adopted regulations that require ignition-resistant construction materials and roofs for manufactured residences outside of mobile home parks, officials said Monday that the Schwarzenegger administration would seek to tighten those regulations for homes within the parks, particularly because an increasing number of California residents have moved deeper into canyons and other areas prone to fires.

“Our focus is primarily on the manufactured housing,” said Chris Anderson, chief of field operations for the division of codes and standards at the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Mr. Anderson said he expected the state to adopt new regulations in January that would extend tougher manufacturing regulations to mobile home parks.

He said there had been “some resistance” from the mobile home industry to increased fire prevention standards, because of the increased costs. But, he said, “most people in California understand that we are in a state that has wildfires. They acknowledged they needed to do something.”

Calls and e-mail messages to a spokeswoman for the Manufactured Housing Institute, a national trade organization, were not returned Monday.

Fire experts said more residents needed to heed local ordinances and use common sense in terms of building and landscaping to prevent homes from being destroyed, a common problem in California. The combination of housing developments in increasingly remote areas and a protracted drought have resulted in devastating loss numerous times in recent years.

“You can have a lot of codes and laws and ordinances,” said Jim Smalley, a program manager for Firewise Communities, an organization that seeks to reduce wildfire risks and damage. “But the problem is that compliance with those codes is voluntary. It’s a social-contract issue, both in understanding where you live and what the hazards are and what you can do about it.”

For example, Mr. Smalley said, in Rancho Santa Fe, an area threatened by fires last year, codes prohibit planting certain types of plants near homes, but residents in subdivisions often do not comply.

“The fire department comes in and says, ‘You can’t plant bougainvillea here,’ ” he said, “and the homeowner says, ‘O.K.,’ and then they go away and they plant it anyway.”

    As Winds Quiet Down, California Fires Are Tamed, NYT, 18.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/us/18Fire.html

Heavy Lake-Effect Snow

Hits Great Lakes States

November 17, 2008
Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CONSTABLEVILLE, N.Y. (AP) -- A blast of cold wind across the Great Lakes piled snow as much as 2 feet deep Monday, an early taste of winter that made driving hazardous and closed some schools across the region.

Moisture picked up from the lakes produced lake-effect snow on the eastern and southern shores of the lakes from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to this snow-prone section of New York.

The National Weather Service said 24 inches of snow had fallen at Constableville, downwind from Lake Ontario on the Tug Hill Plateau. Downwind from Lake Erie in western New York, 20 inches had piled up at South Dayton, near Buffalo.

Snow doesn't usually fall this early at Constableville, librarian Dorothy Valenti said.

''Yesterday morning we had none. So it's quite a transition to go from no snow to all this. When you open the door, it's amazing,'' she said in a telephone interview. ''It's strange to have a snow day before Thanksgiving.''

Still, the Tug Hill Plateau usually gets around 25 feet snow a year, so people are used to it.

''The roads are all plowed. The roads are fine. You can get around -- once you get out of your driveway,'' said Valenti, who walks to work.

''I know people are having a hard time shoveling. It's a wet, heavy snow,'' she said.

Police reported numerous accidents on slippery roads in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York.

In northwest Pennsylvania, Erie reported as much as 14 inches of snow on the ground Monday morning and several schools districts in the region closed or delayed classes.

Up to a foot was forecast by Tuesday in northern Indiana, downwind from Lake Michigan, with 10 inches possible in Ohio's Cleveland area, the weather service said. Up to a foot was possible in parts of Michigan's Upper Peninsula along the shore of Lake Superior. Motorists in northern Indiana were warned that visibility along Interstate 94 and the Indiana Toll Road could drop to near zero at times.

The weather system producing the snow was moving toward the southeast, and the weather service posted a winter storm warning for Tuesday in the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland's Panhandle, saying a foot of snow is possible in places.

    Heavy Lake-Effect Snow Hits Great Lakes States, NYT, 17.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Great-Lakes-Snow.html

California Firefighters

Make Gains on Fires

November 17, 2008
Filed at 11:42 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DIAMOND BAR, Calif. (AP) -- Winds were calm Monday, allowing firefighters to make gains on two raging wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes and forced thousands of residents to flee.

Gusts from the Santa Ana winds had peaked to more than 70 mph at the height of the fires over the weekend, but abated Sunday, and by Monday morning, had weakened to about 20 mph, the National Weather Service said.

''It's wonderful news,'' Angela Garbiso, a spokeswoman with Orange County Fire Authority, said Monday. ''When it calms down, it obviously makes it easier for us to handle this massive undertaking.''

The fires that started Thursday night and burned in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, have burned nearly 41,000 acres or 64 square miles.

In Orange and Riverside counties, the fires chewed through nearly 29,000 acres and were pushing toward Diamond Bar in Los Angeles county. A major aerial attack on Sunday raised containment to 40 percent.

Meanwhile, a 10,000-acre fire that hit hard in the Sylmar area of northern Los Angeles on Saturday moved into the Placerita Canyon area of the rugged San Gabriel Mountains and was burning vigorously, but well outside the city. It was 40 percent contained.

The Santa Barbara-area fire that swept through tony Montecito has burned 1,940 acres and was 95 percent surrounded Monday.

The cause of all the fires were under investigation, although officials said the Santa Barbara-area was ''human caused,'' said Doug Lannon, a spokesman with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Lannon said the fire started in a Montecito landmark known to be a popular hangout for teenagers. He said it was possible someone was smoking in the brush or started a campfire there. Investigators have set up an anonymous tip line in hopes of getting the public's help in finding out who started the fire.

Far away from the flames, the smell of smoke pervaded metropolitan Los Angeles. Downtown skyscrapers were silhouettes in an opaque sky and concerns about air quality kept many people indoors. Organizers on Sunday canceled a marathon in suburban Pasadena where 8,000 runners had planned to participate.

Officials warned of another bad air day on Monday, and classes were canceled at dozens of schools near the fire zones in Orange County.

Many evacuees began the agonizing process of making their way back to their destroyed homes.

Starting Monday morning, anxious residents of the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar, where 484 homes were destroyed by fire early Saturday, will be allowed to return to inspect their property. Firefighters were able to save about 120 other homes in the community, but many were badly damaged.

Cadaver dogs had been searching the burned units to determine whether anybody perished during the fast-moving fire, but so far no bodies have been found, police said.

Tracy Burns knew her Sylmar home was gone but still wanted to get into the gated community to see what remained.

''Even those of us who know there's nothing left, we want to go in and kick over the rubble and see if we can find something, anything,'' Burns said.

Tears welled in her partner Wendy Dannenberg's eyes as she echoed: ''If I can find one broken piece of one dish -- anything, anything at all.''

    California Firefighters Make Gains on Fires, NYT, 17.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html

California Fires

Devastate Close-Knit Community

November 17, 2008
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE and REBECCA CATHCART

LOS ANGELES — David Grieb had just returned home three days earlier from a cross-country drive to be at his dying mother’s bedside when the order came for him to evacuate the Oakridge Mobile Home Park because of an approaching fire.

Several weeks before, Mr. Grieb had been roused by a similar wildfire warning, and he said he spent hours cramming as many of his belongings as he could into his car before fleeing.

When the alarm was raised Friday, Mr. Grieb said he pretty much threw a few items into his car and drove off, leaving behind most of his possessions, including those he had only days before hauled from his late mother’s house in Philadelphia.

“I just lost all the stuff I carted 3,000 miles,” he said.

Firefighters on Sunday began to gain the upper hand with the blaze that destroyed about 500 homes in the development, in the Sylmar area of Los Angeles. They also had controlled 75 percent of the fire at Montecito, a hillside enclave 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles where 111 homes were destroyed since Thursday.

A third wildfire burned along the border of Orange and Riverside Counties. Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion of the Orange County Fire Authority said that firefighters were gaining control of the fire by Sunday night and that most of the 25,000 people who had been evacuated were allowed to return to their neighborhoods. A total of 211 homes, including 50 apartment units, were damaged or destroyed by the fire, which has burned 23,700 acres, Chief Concepcion said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has declared states of emergency in Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara Counties.

The Sylmar fire was about 30 percent contained, firefighters said, but any gains meant little to the hundreds of families of the Oakridge park. Officials say the 500 homes that were destroyed make it one of the worst property losses from fire in the history of Los Angeles.

On Sunday, Mr. Grieb, 46, and other Oakridge residents gathered on a street corner hoping to get into the development to see what was left.

Residents were not allowed in because the development had been declared a crime scene. Los Angeles police officials said they were conducting a routine arson investigation. The Red Cross was registering the residents who had been accounted for, but police officials declined to say how many were missing.

On Sunday, employees of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and sheriff’s deputies leading cadaver dogs were looking through the wreckage for victims. No remains were found.

Mr. Grieb was waiting on Sunday to see whether there was anything to salvage.

“I want to get in, say goodbye and dig through a little,” said Mr. Grieb, a Hollywood teamster who works on the ABC television show “Dirty Sexy Money.”

Mr. Grieb said the only belongings he had left were in his car. “I don’t want to be more than five feet from the stuff I’ve got left,” he said.

Even without getting back to his home, Mr. Grieb is fairly certain that all is lost.

He and his neighbors have seen aerial photos of the devastated development and, in stark black and white, a chalkboard at an evacuation center lists the homes, by lot numbers, that were spared. About 124 out of 600 homes are on the list, and Mr. Grieb’s home is not among them.

For the park’s residents, it was as if an entire village had vanished in the flames.

“I used to refer to it as our little Mayberry,” said Tracey Burns, 47. She and her partner, Wendy Dannenberg, 46, lived in Oakridge for 15 years. Ms. Burns’s parents lived nearby in a part of the complex that was spared by the fire.

“It was just a very nice community,” Ms. Burns said. “Someplace safe with a lot to offer from the pool to the tennis courts to bingo on Tuesday nights. It was a very nice way of living. People waved not because they had to but because they wanted to. We always took offense to people calling it a trailer park because you had a yard, a porch, a garage, a garden. It was a home, not a trailer.”

Like many Oakridge residents, Barbara and John Harris said they were wiped out.

“We lost everything,” Mr. Harris said. “How do you start over when you’re 66?”

Before this weekend, most Oakridge Mobile Home Park residents might have argued that there were few better deals to be had in the Los Angeles area. Living was affordable, and the development was a close-knit community of thrifty families and retirees nestled in the arid foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

In the evenings, with the air made blustery by Santa Ana winds, many residents took walks, stopping occasionally to watch deer, coyotes and raccoons that wandered out of the wilderness.

Many residents of the Oakridge development are elderly or live on fixed incomes and have only a gossamer financial safety net of savings and fire insurance.

Residents who waited to see if the fire would be put down or veer and spare their homes were forced to flee in panic.

Among the last of the people evacuated from the development on Friday night was a 300-pound woman whom firefighters carried out of her bed as flames stabbed through the windows and walls of her home, Los Angeles City Fire Department officials said.

The going was little better for the firefighters, who confronted a blaze fanned by near hurricane force winds that funneled 50-foot flames at a horizontal level. The fire was moving so fast that crews themselves had to flee, leaving their hoses to melt.

Firefighters said their efforts to douse the fire were hindered by failing water pressure. They also complained that the development had only one exit and entrance, which made it difficult to move fire crews in as residents tried to move out.

And some of the very things that made the community so appealing to many of its residents also made it vulnerable.

The wood, aluminum siding and tar roofs of the modular homes provided ready fuel for the fire. The dry winds howling out of the canyons helped spread the flames.

At a news conference near the development, Governor Schwarzenegger said the devastation had convinced him that mobile homes should be required to include more fire-resistant materials.

“The fire ran through the mobile homes so fast,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “Like matches, they caught fire, one right after the other.”

A Los Angeles County supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky, said he would push for better safety regulations for mobile home parks.

“Somehow there’s an assumption that because these are prefabricated homes confined to a small area they are somehow not in the category as other bigger homes,” Mr. Yaroslavsky said. “But this was a community. These homes, however, were flammable and packed in like sardines on top of each other.”

    California Fires Devastate Close-Knit Community, NYT, 17.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/us/17calif.html?hp

Carl D. Keith,

a Father of the Catalytic Converter,

Dies at 88

November 15, 2008
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Carl D. Keith, a co-inventor of the three-way automotive catalytic converter — a major advance in eliminating the toxic tailpipe emissions that once blanketed cities in smog — died Sunday while visiting one of his daughters in New Bern, N.C. He was 88 and lived on Marco Island in Florida.

His grandson Leonard Hardesty Jr. confirmed the death.

Working with John J. Mooney and a team of other chemical engineers at the Engelhard Corporation, one of the world’s largest mineral refining companies, Dr. Keith designed the three-way catalytic converter in the early 1970s, just as the stricter emission requirements of the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970 were coming into effect.

“Billions of people around the world breathe cleaner air because of this invention,” Margo Oge, director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the Environmental Protection Agency, said Friday.

The three-way converter was a significant improvement over what is called the oxidizing converter, the patent for which is held by General Motors. The three-way is now standard for cars and light trucks made in the United States and in most of the rest of the world.

Lindsay Brooke, a senior editor of Automotive Engineering International, the magazine of the Society of Automotive Engineers, said Thursday in an interview, “The catalytic converter, combined with the transition to unleaded gasoline, led to a dramatic improvement in air quality and enabled the auto industry to meet the Clean Air Act regulations.”

A catalytic converter is a can-shaped device installed beneath a vehicle as part of the exhaust pipe. Inside the converter, a bricklike ceramic honeycomb with hundreds of tiny passages is coated with a catalyst material, typically platinum or palladium. When the exhaust flows out of the engine and passes over and through the catalyst coating, a chemical reaction renders three toxic compounds harmless.

The oxidizing converter worked for two of those compounds, turning carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide and water. The three-way device designed by Dr. Keith and his colleagues added the conversion of nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water, greatly reducing the emission of harmful particulates into the air.

According to an E.P.A. statement, today’s cars are 98 percent cleaner in terms of nitrogen oxide emissions than those built in the 1970s, “and the three-way catalytic converter is the greatest contributor to that reduction.”

David Doniger, the director of climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed, pointing out that “smog has gone down sharply, even as the number of cars and the size of the economy has more than doubled.”

Carl Donald Keith was born in Stewart Creek, W.Va., on May 29, 1920, one of three sons of Howard and Mary Rawson Keith. His father was a steelworker, and his mother worked in a bakery.

Dr. Keith graduated from Salem College, in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1943. He received a master’s degree in chemistry from Indiana University in 1945, and a doctorate from DePaul University in 1947.

He was a chemist for Sinclair Oil from 1943 until 1957, and then joined Engelhard Industries. From 1976 to 1985, when he retired, he served as an executive vice president, president and then chairman of the company.

Dr. Keith’s wife, the former Edith Birmingham, died in 2000. He is survived by two daughters, Judith Hardison of New Bern and Carla Hardesty of Randolph, N.J.; six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

In 2002, President Bush presented Dr. Keith and Mr. Mooney with the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor for technological innovation.

    Carl D. Keith, a Father of the Catalytic Converter, Dies at 88, NYT, 15.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/15keith.html

Wildfire Destroys Homes in California

November 14, 2008
Filed at 9:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) -- Firefighters were racing early Friday to push back a wind-whipped wildfire that destroyed at least 100 homes and a college dormitory, injured four people and forced thousands to flee the longtime celebrity hideaway of Montecito.

The fire broke out just before 6 p.m. Thursday and spread to about 2,500 acres -- nearly 4 square miles -- by early Friday, destroying dozens of luxury homes and parts of a college campus in the foothills of Montecito, just southeast of Santa Barbara. About 5,400 homes in the tony community of 14,000 residents were evacuated and more people could be forced to flee if the fire spreads, said Nicole Koon, a spokeswoman with the Santa Barbara County Executive Office.

''We believe 100 plus homes have been destroyed,'' Koon said. ''It's our best guess at the moment because it's dark. We're not counting as much as trying to protect the homes.''

At Westmont College, a Christian liberal arts college nestled amid wooded rolling hills, some 1,000 students were caught off-guard by the rapidly moving flames.

''It came pretty fast,'' said Tyler Rollema, a 19-year-old sophomore who was eating dinner in the cafeteria when students were told to head to the gym. ''We came out and it was just blazing.''

Thousands of feet above the flames, footage shot from television helicopters showed what initially looked like a massive campfire with dozens of glowing embers. When cameras zoomed in, however, what appeared to be flaring coals turned out to be houses -- many of them sprawling estates -- gutted by flame. Palm trees were lit like burning matches.

''It looked like lava coming down a volcano,'' Leslie Hollis Lopez said as she gathered belongings from her house.

About 500 firefighters were trying to stop the flames from marching farther west to dense neighborhoods in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara City Fire spokesman John Ahlman told KABC-TV he spotted about 20 homes burning Thursday night in the city.

About 200 people spent the night at an evacuation center at a high school in nearby Goleta, but rest was out of the question for Ed Naha. He was worried about his home in the hills above Santa Barbara.

''I don't think we are going to have the house when we go back,'' Naha said.

The 58-year-old writer had been home working on his computer when smoke blanketed his house. He gathered his insurance documents, his wife and two dogs and left as flames approached his neighborhood.

''We are used to seeing smoke because we do have fires up here, but I've never seen that reddish, hellish glow that close,'' he said. ''I was waiting for Dante and Virgil to show up.''

Fire officials planned an aggressive attack from the air at daybreak Friday with the help of nine water-dropping helicopters and 10 air tankers, said Terri Nisich, another spokeswoman with the Santa Barbara County Executive Office.

The injured included two firefighters who suffered smoke inhalation and two residents taken to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital with substantial burns, hospital spokeswoman Janet O'Neil said.

The fire was fanned by evening winds known locally as ''sundowners,'' which gusted up to 70 mph from land to sea late Thursday. Around sunset, winds shift from the normal onshore flow of cool, moist sea breezes and push downhill from the Santa Ynez Mountains.

The winds weakened overnight, with gusts reaching from 17 to 25 mph, said Jamie Meier, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. ''We're expecting conditions to improve for firefighters on the lines, but it will still be warm and dry through tomorrow,'' she said.

The fire temporarily knocked out power to more than 20,000 homes in Santa Barbara, Southern California Edison spokesman Paul Klein said

At Westmont College, the air was dense with smoke and the scent of burning pine. Flames chewed through a eucalyptus grove on the 135-acre campus and destroyed several buildings housing the physics and psychology departments, a dormitory and at least one faculty home, college spokesman Scott Craig said.

''I saw flames about 100 feet high in the air shooting up with the wind just howling,'' he told AP Radio. ''Now when the wind howls and you've got palm trees and eucalyptus trees that are literally exploding with their hot oil, you've got these big, red hot embers that are flying through the sky and are catching anything on fire.''

Hundreds of students fled to gym, where they spent the night sleeping on the floor. Some stood in groups praying, others sobbed openly and comforted each other.

Beth Lazor, 18, said she was in her dorm when the alarm went off. She said she only had time to grab her laptop, phone, a teddy bear and a debit card before fleeing the burning building.

Her roommate, Catherine Wilson, said she didn't have time to get anything.

''I came out and the whole hill was glowing,'' Wilson said. ''There were embers falling down.''

Montecito, a quiet community known for its Mediterranean-like climate and charming Spanish colonial homes tucked behind lush front yards, has long attracted celebrities such as Michael Douglas, Rob Lowe and Oprah Winfrey, who owns a 42-acre estate there. The landmark Montecito Inn was built in the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, and the nearby San Ysidro Ranch was the honeymoon site of John F. Kennedy in 1953.

Publicists for Lowe and Winfrey told the AP the celebrities' homes had not been destroyed and neither was not staying in the area Thursday night.

Montecito suffered a major fire in 1977, when more than 200 homes burned. A fire in 1964 burned about 67,000 acres and damaged 150 houses and buildings.

------

Associated Press writers Greg Risling, Denise Petski and Daisy Nguyen in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that 5,400 homes have been evacuated.)

    Wildfire Destroys Homes in California, NYT, 15.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html?hp

Editorial

Another Parting Gift

November 7, 2008
The New York Times

Gale Norton has to be happy. In 2003, Ms. Norton, then President Bush’s secretary of the interior (and now a senior oil executive at Royal Dutch Shell), struck a deal with the governor of Utah that would open about 3 million pristine acres of federal land to oil and gas drilling.

Environmental groups and the courts managed to keep the drillers at bay. No longer. In the last few days, the Bureau of Land Management has completed six long-range management plans for Utah that will expose these acres (and as many as 6 million more) to some form of commercial exploitation.

On Tuesday, the bureau announced that it would soon begin selling oil and gas leases — essentially the right to drill — in some of the most beautiful and fragile areas.

Conservationists are aghast, and rightly so. Apparently without consulting the National Parks Service, one of its sister agencies at the Interior Department, the bureau plans to auction more than two dozen leases adjacent to Arches National Park and very close to Canyonlands National Park, risking the parks’ air and water.

Also on the auction block, among other rare and spectacular vistas, is Desolation Canyon, so named by the explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869 while he traveled down the Green River to the Grand Canyon.

This sort of pillage would be hard to justify even if Utah’s reserves were large enough to make a difference, which they are not. The Energy Information Administration says that Utah has 2.5 percent of the country’s known natural gas reserves and less than 1 percent of its known oil reserves. And even if those reserves were worth going after, it would still be essential to protect areas of special cultural, scenic and recreational value.

The Interior Department’s writ is to manage the public lands for “multiple uses,” a difficult and ambiguous task. The Clinton administration issued many leases but tried hard to balance the competing claims of commerce and nature; the Bush administration heard only the voice of Vice President Dick Cheney and his one-sided mantra of “drill now, drill everywhere.”

This is but the latest of President Bush’s last-minute assaults on the environment. The incoming Obama administration will have to quickly review and reverse these decisions or find ways to mitigate the damage.

    Another Parting Gift, NYT, 7.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/opinion/07fri2.html

Massive cleanup

continues long after Hurricane Ike

6 November 2008
USA Today
By Oren Dorell

Hurricane Ike produced a staggering amount of debris, and it may take months for Galveston, Houston and coastal parishes in Louisiana to dispose of what some say is record destruction waste.
"This is a huge amount of debris," said Robert Isakson, managing director of DRC Emergency Services.

DRC, based in Mobile, Ala., is under contract to clear half of Galveston, Houston and 35 parishes in Louisiana desolated Sept. 13 by the Category 2 hurricane.

"The volume that has been recovered at this stage is much greater than in Katrina," he said, referring to the 2005 hurricane that laid waste to New Orleans.

The cleanup of shattered homes, appliances, cars, boats, trees and utility poles left by Ike has reached stratospheric numbers:

• 17 million cubic yards of the estimated 25 million cubic yards of debris in Texas has been collected.

• 8.6 million cubic yards has been trucked from Louisiana.

• Texas has been billed $80 million for the cleanup, and that number will likely rise, said Simon Chabel, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Five thousand workers for DRC have hauled away 12,000 flooded and destroyed vehicles in Louisiana alone. In Galveston, workers collected 592,000 pounds of hazardous household waste such as medications and bleach; 28,000 refrigerators, ranges and freezers; 3,000 televisions and computer screens; and 13,000 pounds of animal carcasses.

Among the more unusual finds was a 450-pound dead alligator in a home.

The vast majority of debris is recycled as workers dismantle refrigerators, remove car tires and drain cars of fluids before crushing them. The workers also grind trees into chips that can be turned into mulch or fuel for factories.

The 11-foot storm surge that swept much of Galveston Island flushed into canals rat poisons, fertilizers, paints and other chemicals, but Isakson said the risk is minimal because the pollutants become diluted in the water.

He estimated that about 15% of the debris is going to landfills.

Marina Joseph, spokeswoman for Houston's solid waste management department, said the cleanup is going much faster than the aftermath of 1983's Hurricane Alicia, the last direct strike on the city.

"After Alicia, we had a lot of mom-and-pop collectors," Joseph said. "What we had here was an organized force that went out."

Houston Mayor Bill White plans to announce a call for volunteers this weekend to help senior citizens and disabled residents clean their yards and bring debris to the curb before the city suspends debris operations.

Galveston, too, is getting close to the end of the job provided people do as they have been asked.

Property owners are responsible for dragging their debris to the street, where it is picked up by the haulers. That hauling contract will expire soon, city spokeswoman Mary Jo Naschke said.

"What we don't want is when people are trying to get their businesses started and here comes a latecomer and there is no one to pick it up so it just sits there," she said.

    Massive cleanup continues long after Hurricane Ike, UT, 6.11.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-06-ike-aftermath_N.htm

Magnitude-6.1 Quake

Shakes Aleutian Islands

November 2, 2008
Filed at 11:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The U.S. Geological Survey says a significant earthquake has jolted the ocean floor near Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands.

The agency says in a preliminary report that the magnitude-6.1 quake struck the seismically active but sparsely populated island chain at 4:49 a.m. Sunday.

It was centered at a depth of about 39 miles, and 35 miles southwest of the island of Atka, which lies about 1,100 miles southwest of Anchorage.

The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center says no tsunami is expected from the quake.

A police dispatcher in the town of St. Paul -- some 400 miles away -- says he felt no tremors and has heard no reports of damages or injuries.

    Magnitude-6.1 Quake Shakes Aleutian Islands, NYT, 2.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Aleutians-Earthquake.html

Texas Floats Plan

to House Ike Victims Aboard Ship

October 31, 2008
Filed at 10:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOUSTON (AP) -- An aging cruise ship could become temporary housing for Hurricane Ike refugees if Texas officials can navigate through the federal government's paperwork.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they had not received a formal request for funds to use the ship and that a state agency's e-mail to a FEMA administrator did not follow protocol for making such a request.

Simon Chabel, a spokesman in FEMA's joint field office in Austin, said the request must go through the state's department of emergency management and be made on a specific form.

''This process exists so we can ensure that the state is speaking with one voice when they asked us for things,'' Chabel said.

The 1950s-era Regal Empress, with up to 1,200 available beds, left port in Galveston on Thursday and dropped anchor about 10 miles offshore, said Jim Bourke, the ship's agent. A port official said the ship had to leave to make room for others arriving this weekend.

The crew will wait until Monday to find out if the ship's next destination is Port Orange, about 100 miles up the Texas coast, or the Bahamas, where it would resume round-trip cruises to Florida in December, Bourke said.

About 3,000 displaced victims are seeking shelter in southeast Texas where the state would like to put the cruise ship to use, said Michael Gerber, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs executive director.

''We were identifying an option, and I stated the state's interest that we wanted FEMA to explore it,'' he said. ''If there are forms to fill out, I'm sure FEMA will let us know what those forms are.''

Gerber sent an e-mail Monday to Harvey Johnson, FEMA's deputy administrator and chief operating officer, about using the ship for temporary housing. He also spoke to Johnson by phone.

His e-mail said the affected area has received only 262 mobile home or park model units for people displaced by Ike, which came ashore near Galveston on Sept. 13.

''Despite being promised 300 units a week, local officials are now desperate to keep their citizens in place and living close to employment,'' the e-mail said.

Using cruise ships caused FEMA some angst after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The agency was criticized for signing a six-month, $236-million deal with Carnival Cruise Lines for temporary housing on three ships. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, then the top Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, said at the time that he had documents from 2002 showing that Carnival normally earned revenue of $150 million over six months.

Regal Empress owner James Verrillo told the Houston Chronicle he was offering a daily rate of $48 per person, plus $7 per meal. State officials say the lodging rate is less than FEMA is paying to house storm victims in hotels.

The 611-foot ship was built in 1953 and is due to be taken out of service in 2010.

''We're not talking about a more modern luxury ship,'' Gerber said. ''This is a pragmatic option for folks who really don't have any other choices.''

The ship had been docked in Galveston since Sept. 28 and provided temporary housing for about 300 disaster relief workers hired by Belfor USA, a company contracted to clean storm debris from the port, assistant harbormaster Mike Ziesemer said. The last of the workers moved off the ship Saturday, he said.

Gerber said Johnson visited southeast Texas earlier this week to survey the housing situation. He said the cruise ship was only one of the options FEMA is considering.

Gerber acknowledged that cruise ships probably aren't the best option for temporary housing.

''For families, it's hard to say that the ideal solution is to put 1,000 people on a boat for some period of time,'' he said. ''It's cramped space, it's not adequate storage. But absent hotels and motels or multifamily apartments, it's worth taking a good hard look at.''

    Texas Floats Plan to House Ike Victims Aboard Ship, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Shelter-Ship.html

Thoreau Is Rediscovered

as a Climatologist

October 28, 2008
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

CONCORD, Mass. — Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.

He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons.

Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord — and by extension, New England — and to link those patterns to changing climate.

Their conclusions are clear. On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life,” Dr. Davis said. “They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”

Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, “we could only find 7,” Dr. Primack said.

From 1851 through 1858, Thoreau tracked the first flowerings of perhaps 500 species, Dr. Primack said. “He knew what he was doing, and he did it really systematically.”

Dr. Primack and Dr. Miller-Rushing did their own surveys in 2004, 2005 and 2006. They also consulted notes from Pennie Logemann, a landscape designer who tracked flowering times from 1963 to 1993 as an aid to planning Concord gardens. And they looked at contributions by members of area plant, insect and bird clubs and the work of additional participants in Concord’s long line of passionate amateur naturalists, some of whose records are preserved in the Free Public Library here.

One of them, Richard J. Eaton, is best known to botanists for his 1974 book, “A Flora of Concord.” Dr. Primack recalled that as a graduate student at Harvard, he had worked alongside Mr. Eaton in the university’s natural history collection — curators relegated the two of them to the same obscure table. “He was just this very elderly man,” Dr. Primack recalled. “Not a professor, an enthusiast. But he was a very, very good botanist. He used very good methods.”

Another contributor, Alfred Hosmer, is more obscure, but his contribution is enormous: detailed notes he made in Concord from 1888 through 1902.

“He was a storekeeper,” Dr. Primack told a small group of graduate students as he gathered them around a table in a special collections room in the Concord library one recent morning. He opened a gray cardboard box, sifted through photocopies of Thoreau’s notoriously hard-to-read notes and pulled out what looked like an ancient composition book. He turned to a page where an inventory of orchid species ended and one of irises began. The entries move across the page in tiny but precise script.

“You can imagine this as a storekeeper’s ledger,” Dr. Primack said. But Hosmer’s plant nomenclature was more accurate than Thoreau’s, he said. “Plus we can read his writing.”

According to Dr. Primack, Hosmer spent “15 years walking around Concord for several hours a day several times a week” making notes about plants. “He never wrote about why he was doing this,” Dr. Primack said, “but he had known Thoreau when he was a boy. Hosmer was one of the first people who said Thoreau was a genius and not just a nut.”

Dr. Primack said he had never heard of Hosmer until his interest in Thoreau led him to search for old journals, diaries and other records. “I started going to all these funny scientific societies we have,” he said. “I was getting up in the ‘new business’ and telling people what I was looking for. I got a lot of leads, but most were not very useful. Then Ray Angelo told me about Hosmer.”

Mr. Angelo, who stepped down recently as curator of vascular plants at the New England Botanical Club, is the author of a monograph, “Concord Area Trees and Shrubs.” The eminent biologist Ernst Mayr once called him “the most knowledgeable student of the Concord flora” and today, when Dr. Primack and the other researchers are looking for this species or that in Concord, Mr. Angelo tells them where to find it.

The most daunting challenge, though, was making sense of this kind of data.

“There were a couple of big problems,” Dr. Miller-Rushing, now at the University of Maryland, said in a telephone interview from Colorado, where he was studying mountain plants. “Thoreau had incredibly messy handwriting. That was a big difficulty.” Also, he said, “in some cases he and Hosmer called the same species by different names. We had to figure all that out.”

Their work with Dr. Davis and his students began then, after they heard the two give talks at Harvard on their efforts and convinced them additional analysis was necessary.

“We just treated each individual species as a data point,” Dr. Primack said. “That was not the way to do it.” Dr. Davis and two of his graduate students, Charles G. Willis and Brad Ruhfel, began looking at the species data from an evolutionary perspective including, for example, the relationship between species traits and abundance. “Those species that are falling out are more closely related than you would expect,” Mr. Willis said.

As Dr. Davis put it, “certain branches of the tree of life are being lopped off.”

But when Dr. Davis and his colleagues began analyzing the data, things got off to a rough start. “It’s actually a very specialized kind of analysis,” Dr. Primack said. Mr. Willis “kept explaining what the analysis was showing, and I kept saying, ‘I don’t understand.’ ”

Once he did understand, he added, it became apparent that “a couple of times they had not done the analysis correctly because they did not understand the field data.”

Now, though, they have figured out how to communicate. “Climate change, ecology and evolutionary biology have been going their own separate ways,” Mr. Ruhfel said. “We see now we have information we can share and really further the field.”

Now the professors and their graduate students are on the trail of more data. For example, there is growing evidence that as birds change their migration patterns in response to climate change, they may no longer be in sync with the insect species they feed on. Elizabeth Bacon, another of Dr. Primack’s graduate students, is combing Thoreau’s notes on birds and the records of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, a local organization, to see what they can contribute.

Dr. Miller-Rushing worked this summer in the Rockies on whether plants that begin to flower earlier have more problems with late-season frost.

Mr. Willis and Mr. Ruhfel are looking at which species are moving in to Concord to occupy niches vacated by vanished plants, and whether they come from “adjacent species pools,” as Mr. Willis puts it.

The scientists say their research demonstrates the importance of simply watching the landscape and recording what occurs in it. And it demonstrates the importance of old records and natural history collections, Dr. Davis said. But in general, he said, there is little interest in devoting money, time and space to their preservation.

“It’s hard to defend the space on major campuses,” Dr. Davis said. “Eaton could not have prepared his ‘Flora’ unless Harvard University had maintained herbarium specimens. Hosmer’s book was here in Concord for 100 years before anyone used it.”

    Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/science/earth/28wald.html

Reburying the dead a grim task

in Ike's wake

20 October 2008
USA Today
By Melinda Deslatte, Associated Press Writer

IN THE MARSH OF CAMERON PARISH, Louisiana — Joe Johnson craned his neck from the airboat as it circled a patch of brown marsh grass. The runaway coffin was not where it was supposed to be.
Johnson pulled up to a pile of rocks, killed the motor and hopped out. After a few minutes of scouring along the tall, reedlike grass, he flagged down two fishermen.

"Can you possibly take me along the shoreline?" Johnson asked. "I'm looking for a casket."

Beyond the usual, dismal rebuilding, Hurricane Ike left another grim task when it struck the U.S. Gulf Coast last month: Its 13-foot storm surge washed an estimated 200 caskets out of their graves, ripping through most of Cameron Parish's 47 cemeteries and others in southwest Louisiana and coastal Texas. Some coffins floated miles into the marsh.

At Hollywood Cemetery in Orange, Texas, Ike unearthed about 100 caskets. Dozens more were disgorged in hard-hit Galveston.

Officials in coastal areas have long struggled with interring the dead, as caskets buried in low-lying areas are susceptible to being belched up by floodwaters. Some areas — most notably New Orleans — house the dead in above-ground crypts to keep them from drifting away in storms.

For many of the dead forced up by Ike, it wasn't their first disturbance. About 80% of the caskets in southwest Louisiana displaced by Ike were rousted by Hurricane Rita just three years earlier, said Zeb Johnson, the Calcasieu Parish deputy coroner who's headed casket recovery efforts for Rita and Ike.

Of the caskets ejected by Rita in September 2005, 335 were found and reburied, he said. Eighteen were never found.

"Our mother came out for Rita, and now she came out for Ike," said Debra Dyson, a commercial fisher whose house in Cameron was destroyed by Ike.

Dyson said coffins holding her brother-in-law and cousin also were heaved out by Rita. Ike was worse — the storm thrust out caskets containing her mother, brother-in-law, cousin, niece, three uncles and two aunts.

The one containing Dyson's mother floated to the same spot it came to rest after Rita, 22 miles from the cemetery. Only this time, it didn't take nine months to find it.

"It's hard to lose your home, but the first stop you make is that cemetery just to make sure they're still there, and it's heartbreaking when they're not," said Marilyn Dyson Elizondo, Dyson's sister who lives in Dayton, Texas.

Zeb Johnson helms a team of two employees, volunteer boat pilots and state prisoners to search hundreds of miles of marsh with loaned equipment and haul coffins back to shore. The work is backbreaking, with caskets weighed down by mud in swampy areas teeming with alligators and snakes and the stench of rotting marsh grass.

"It's a job that has to be done," said Joe Johnson, a funeral director and embalmer from Lake Charles who is not related to the deputy coroner.

Joe Johnson's half-hour ride with the fishermen didn't turn up the pink casket reported to the coroner's office, like so many other tips that don't pan out. An hour later, however, he returned with another coffin found in thick grass near a canal bank.

A hole was drilled into the silver metal container to drain out marsh muck and lighten the load for the airboat. Prisoners pulling the casket from the boat tipped it again to empty out more of the fetid water.

The coffin was trucked to the city coliseum in Lake Charles, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was providing refrigerated trucks to hold caskets until reburial arrangements could be made.

"It's a slow process," Zeb Johnson said.

The Calcasieu Parish Coroner's Office is footing most of the search and recovery bill, which hasn't been tallied. But reburying the dead is estimated to cost as much as $100,000 on top of the recovery costs, with much of the money needed for new caskets and vaults. Zeb Johnson wasn't sure who'll cover that price tag, so he wasn't sure when reburial could begin.

More than 140 coffins had been found by Wednesday, and about 20 others that didn't stray far from their burial sites were quickly reburied. Zeb Johnson doesn't expect to find all of the two dozen or more that remain missing.

"The first day we found caskets that had floated 30 miles from their cemeteries," he said. "You just have caskets floating out in the marsh. At least seven of these caskets ended up in Texas, kind of like boats, they just got out in the currents from the high waters and carried them to Texas."

The identification work in many instances is easier this time around. Bodies found after Rita were tagged with special markers, as were the silver metal coffins in which they were reburied. The coffins include a scroll with the deceased's name, where they were buried and other information.

A few families are considering reburials on higher ground. Cameron Parish's government has proposed requiring deeper burials.

Elizondo, whose family awaits word on the missing Dyson caskets, said her brother was buried in January in a deeper vault than those that housed her missing relatives. Ike didn't disturb her brother, so Elizondo wants to rebury her mother the same way, though it is more expensive.

"It's worth it. That way we have the peace of mind that mom won't be gone again," Elizondo said. "We've even offered to do the backhoe ourselves. We just don't want her coming back up again."

    Reburying the dead a grim task in Ike's wake, UT, 20.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/hurricanes/2008-10-20-ike-coffins_N.htm

Editorial

Where Water Trumps Energy

October 15, 2008
The New York Times

Deep beneath the Earth’s surface from New York to West Virginia sits the Marcellus Shale, an enormous geological deposit of natural gas. Natural gas is one of the cleanest fuels available — if you can extract it without ruining the water around it.

Retrieving Marcellus natural gas requires hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling, a process that shoots millions of gallons of water deep underground to break the rock and unlock the gas. Now that prospectors are using this process increasingly in Pennsylvania and hoping to begin soon in New York, there are two important questions: Where will all that water come from? And what happens to it when it is no longer needed?

New York officials are exploring whether it’s possible to drill safely without poisoning water supplies. High on our list of concerns is whether the used water — some of it tainted with toxic chemicals — will later seep into streams, rivers and deep water wells, placing New York City’s municipal water supply at risk. Before the state allows exploration, there should be a clear agreement on how the used water will be dealt with safely.

Energy companies have already signed so many new leases for drilling rights with landowners in New York and Pennsylvania that one farmer called it a “modern-day gold rush.” Nobody wants to deprive these landowners of the money they can make, but the price of their good fortune cannot be the contamination of water supplies for everyone else.

Pete Grannis, the New York State environmental commissioner, promised at a recent hearing that, “we will not permit any drilling to take place that presents any threat to the city’s drinking-water supply.” That is an important commitment, but Mr. Grannis and Gov. David Paterson should take the safest course. While they search for ways to encourage drilling in less-sensitive areas, they should ban drilling anywhere near water supplies, and especially the city’s watershed.

State leaders in all of the areas touched by the Marcellus formation must find a balance between the need for energy and the need to protect water.

    Where Water Trumps Energy, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/opinion/15wed3.html?ref=opinion

Wildfires Force Evacuations in L.A.

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES — Fierce wildfires erupted in Southern California on Monday, leaving two people dead and heralding the start of the most intense period of the fire season here.

The most severe fires, fanned by stiff, dry Santa Ana winds typical of the fall, were burning several thousand acres at the rim of the San Fernando Valley. A homeless man and his dog died when fire engulfed the wood-and-cardboard shack where they lived along a freeway embankment, and another person died in a collision on a freeway on-ramp attributed at least in part to thick smoke shrouding the area.

With strong winds expected into Tuesday, firefighters mounted an all-out air and land assault as the flames and smoke chased residents from their homes, threatened neighborhoods, closed schools and parts of two major freeways, and led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.

“It was really quick,” said Eddie Chicasi, 23, who evacuated to a shelter in the Chatsworth neighborhood as flames threatened his home near Porter Ranch. “As we were coming down our little road, bushes and trees on the side were catching on fire.”

Smaller fires broke out in San Diego and Orange Counties, while in Northern California firefighters were bringing under control a stubborn blaze on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, home to a historic immigration station. Only an abandoned water tank was destroyed there.

The cause of most of the blazes was not known, though at least one of the major fires here was thought to be of suspicious origin.

The outbreak of fires came one week shy of the first anniversary of a series of blazes in Southern California that destroyed more than 2,200 homes, killed 10 people, burned more than half a million acres from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara County and resulted in the largest evacuation in state history.

Every fall, until the first rains in November or December, firefighters and homeowners brace for trouble from the Santa Anas, which blow hot, dry wind from the east that can turn minor fires into raging storms.

“We always think of fires moving as a wave, but fires move under the Santa Ana winds by leapfrog,” said Scott Stephens, the co-director of the Center for Fire Research and Outreach at the University of California, Berkeley. “There are hundreds of waves, and as the embers hop in front, the fire could be starting a mile or two behind. That’s why it can jump an eight-lane highway.”

Before the strong winds arrived Monday, firefighters had made progress Sunday in containing a fire in the northeast San Fernando Valley that began near Marek Canyon.

It was in this fire that the homeless man, whose identity was not known, died. The fire scorched more than 5,000 acres, burned several mobile homes and forced 1,200 people near the Lake View Terrace district to evacuate.

“We could have had an army there, and it would not have stopped it,” said Battalion Chief Mario Rueda of the Los Angeles Fire Department. “Wind is king here; it’s dictating everything we are doing.”

Then, on Monday morning, another large blaze, called the Sesnon fire, broke out in the Porter Ranch area, consuming more than 5,000 acres.

“We just grabbed some photo albums, important documents, the dog and we were out,” said Mary Ann Hooper, 70, who evacuated reluctantly after the police came to her door. “I was getting kind of anxious, but now I just want my home.”

Michael Parrish and Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Liz Robbins from New York.

    Wildfires Force Evacuations in L.A., NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/14fire.html?hp

On Parched Farms,

Using Intuition to Find Water

October 9, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

WATERFORD, Calif. — Phil Stine is not crazy, or possessed, or even that special, he says. He has no idea how he does what he does. From most accounts, he does it very well.

“Phil finds the water,” said Frank Assali, an almond farmer and convert. “No doubt about it.”

Mr. Stine, you see, is a “water witch,” one of a small band of believers for whom the ancient art of dowsing is alive and well.

Emphasis, of course, on well. Using nothing more than a Y-shaped willow stick, Mr. Stine has as his primary function determining where farmers should drill to slake their crops’ thirst, adding an element of the mystical to a business where the day-to-day can often be painfully plain.

Asked how he does it, Mr. Stine has a standard retort.

“I just tell people,” Mr. Stine said, “it’s the amount of lead” in your haunches.

Scientists pooh-pooh dowsers like Mr. Stine, saying their abilities are roughly on par with a roll of the dice. But witches have been much in demand of late in rural California, the nation’s biggest agricultural engine, struggling through its second year of drought.

The dry period has resulted in farm layoffs, restrictions on residential and agricultural water use, and hard times for all manner of ancillary businesses, like tractor dealerships and roadside diners.

“There is a domino effect to the point that a little clothing store goes out of business in a town, because the people living there move on,” said Doug Mosebar, the president of the California Farm Bureau.

The state estimates nearly $260 million in crop damages through August. The drought has been particularly hard on areas like the Central Valley, the state’s 400-mile-long farming basin, and in Southern California, where some avocado farmers have taken to stumping their trees, cutting them back to the base rather than watering them. Statewide, farmers have left nearly 80,000 acres fallow rather than struggle — and pay handsomely — to keep them irrigated.

The dry times have meant good business for people like Blake Hennings, a well-driller in the Central Valley city of Turlock, who says he has a lengthy waiting list and a yard full of worn-down drill bits. At a recent job he dug five test holes, all of which had been identified by a water witch like Mr. Stine.

“We only had one bad one,” said Mr. Hennings, whose brother Curtis also dabbles with the dowser. “How they do it is beyond me.”

How many rural witches are still around is an open question. Water witches have no trade unions — or covens. Few advertise, or dowse full time.

Mr. Stine, for example, offers his services without charge, though he says he does accept thanks of another sort. “I got a bunch of gift certificates,” he said.

Dowsers have been part of lore for millenniums, and many on the farm today have no doubt they have special abilities. Richard Cotta, the chief executive of California Dairies, a Central Valley cooperative, said he vividly remembered the first time he saw a witch.

“I was 6 years old,” Mr. Cotta recalled. “A neighbor’s well had gone dry, and this old fellow came out and he witched it, quite a ways away from the other well. Doggone it, I’ll be darned if they didn’t get water. That made a believer out of me.”

So much of a believer, in fact, that Mr. Cotta recently walked away from a land deal because Mr. Stine said there was no water to be found. “He said he couldn’t find enough water to do what we wanted,” Mr. Cotta said.

Thomas Harter, a hydrologist at the University of California, Davis, who runs workshops with farmers looking to drill wells, said there was no scientific evidence that dowsers had special talent at finding water. They are, however, usually much cheaper than the various scientific tools, like electromagnetic imaging or seismic studies, that can help find aquifers.

“It’s worth a bottle of whiskey to have a guy come out,” Dr. Harter said.

But Dr. Harter also said men like Mr. Stine, who worked in the irrigation business for nearly half a century, could have an intuitive sense of where water was, simply by dint of knowing the territory.

In the Central Valley, which was once the bottom of a giant inland lake that water soaked into for eons, finding groundwater for domestic use is pretty easy, Dr. Harter said. But Mr. Stine’s efforts are reserved for agricultural wells, which need to produce much more water and sometimes can run 1,000 feet deep.

Mr. Stine is 77 and retired from a successful irrigation business here in Waterford, a town of about 7,000 on the banks of a slender section of the Tuolumne River, the same river from which he now cuts his willow branches.

What does he look for in a good dowsing rod?

“It’s got to have leaves on it, and it can’t really be bigger than your finger,” Mr. Stine said. “And you got to find one with a fork in it.”

He says he was taught his dark arts many years back by a fellow irrigator who used a metal coat hanger and a hard hat to dowse.

“He used a metal rod and wore a metal hat, and that thing would hit his head,” Mr. Stine said. “So he always wore that hat.”

The American Society of Dowsers, an organization based in Vermont, claims more than 3,000 members who use various tools — pendulums, L-shaped rods, bobbers — on all manner of mystery, finding minerals and lost objects, and even attaining “ancient wisdom,” according to the group’s Web site.

“Dowsing is a system that uses tools,” said George Weller, the society’s national president. “And the tools give you an answer.”

Mr. Stine, a plain-spoken Baptist, claims no connection with a higher power or otherworldly sensations when dowsing, merely a strong tugging in the hands. “You can feel it twist,” he said. “You can’t hang on to it. It will actually break in your hand.”

On an afternoon not long ago, Mr. Stine was summoned to a parched patch of earth outside Merced, Calif., owned by Mr. Assali and Mr. Cotta.

Mr. Stine’s process is simple: walk the eastern edge of the property with the willow held straight up. When it bends toward him, he marks the spot with a flag and keeps walking. If he gets two or three in quick succession, he is convinced there is a stream somewhere underfoot.

On Mr. Assali’s and Mr. Cotta’s land, Mr. Stine worked fast, practically speed-walking. And then, after about 150 feet, the willow bowed suddenly — inexplicably — toward Mr. Stine’s chest.

“There it goes,” he said, his hands straining against the stick.

And so it went, again and again as Mr. Stine moved along the property’s perimeter, planting perhaps 20 flags. Mr. Assali said he would start drilling on Mr. Stine’s recommendation as soon as he could.

    On Parched Farms, Using Intuition to Find Water, NYT, 9.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/09water.html

Three Weeks After Storm,

a Grim Task of Recovery

October 5, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Tex. — Jerrith Baird last spoke to his grandmother by telephone the night Hurricane Ike swept away most of the houses on this narrow spit of land.

The grandmother, Jennifer McLemore, 58, who worked at a local hospital, had holed up with her dog in a newly built beach house on stilts. She giggled with nervous fear, as she described to her grandson how three neighboring houses were being carried away in a flood, along with a trailer home she owned.

Then her cellphone went dead. The next day Jerrith, 17, kayaked from High Island, where he lives, over to the town of Gilchrist, then waded through debris to where Ms. McLemore’s house had been. Nothing was left but a couple of pilings sticking up from a concrete slab. Her car was half underwater in the bay. No one has heard from her since.

“To me,” Jerrith said, “the worst part was thinking what may have went through her mind.”

Three weeks after Hurricane Ike hit Texas, at least 34 people from the Bolivar Peninsula, where the storm did the worst damage, are missing and some are presumed dead, said Galveston County officials and the Laura Recovery Center, a nonprofit organization that has tracked missing people for the county.

All last week, volunteers and state rescue workers combed miles of debris on the peninsula and in the marshes on the east side of Galveston Bay, using dogs trained to find human cadavers.

The volunteers say it is slow going, wading through salt grass and brackish gullies, full of the detritus of ruined lives — broken houses, boats, cars, machinery, appliances, toilets, bicycles, toothbrushes, vases, tools.

Two bodies of people from the Bolivar Peninsula have been recovered so far. On Sept. 24, Gail Ettinger, 58, a chemist who worked for oil companies, was found dead, face down in a marsh on the mainland, about 10 miles from where her house in Gilchrist succumbed to the floodwaters. Three days later, Herman Mosely, a carpenter in his 40s who was last seen in a local bar, was found on a small uninhabited island in Galveston Bay.

So complete was the devastation on the peninsula that county officials and local firefighters fear some hurricane victims may be lost at sea or hidden in the vast marshes of Chambers County, just east of Houston.

“Some people will never be found,” said Colin Rizzo, the county official overseeing the search.

Though its eye remained far out to sea, the storm’s outer winds pushed a flood of water across the peninsula early in the morning on Sept. 12, trapping more than 100 people who had been assured they would have time to leave, residents said.

During the day, rescue workers in helicopters saved about 130 people from the floodwaters — plucking many from swamped cars that they had tried to flee the storm in — before the winds grew too strong to continue the operations.

Yet scores stayed behind or found themselves trapped in their houses, either because they believed they could weather the storm or because they were too old and infirm to escape, residents and family members of the missing said.

The floods rose to at least 18 feet above normal tide, inundating the peninsula, while 100-mile-per-hour winds battered the houses. The wall of water washed scores of homes into the bay beyond the peninsula, leaving a bombed-out landscape of ruins, debris and sand.

Survivors told terrifying stories. A local welder spent the night in a lifejacket with his hand clamped on a flashlight, watching the floodwaters flow just beneath his deck while the winds ripped away at his house. Another man ended up naked in a tree a hundred yards from his demolished home. Two others floated across the bay, clinging to floating debris, and washed up the next day in Chambers County.

Michael Clow, a 53-year-old handyman, said he swam to a neighbor’s house after his cinder-block home broke to pieces around him. Struggling in water far above his head, Mr. Clow floated on a cooler in which he had stuffed two kittens, some cigarettes and a stash of beer.

“I said you are either going to die or you are going to get to that house,” he recalled, sitting like a shipwrecked sailor in the wreckage of his home.

Residents here fear that most of the people who are still missing were not as fortunate. Sandy Walton, a 54-year-old employee at the Rancho Carribe golf course, was caught in the storm surge with her boyfriend, Bob Anderson, as they left her office the afternoon of Sept. 12. She was swept out to sea as he watched helplessly, the authorities said.

The storm also caught several elderly and disabled people off guard.

Dolores Brookshire, a 72-year-old part-time cashier, called her niece, Joann Mier, at 5 a.m. on the day the outer bands of the storm arrived. She had no car and lived in a house in Port Bolivar with her son, Charles Allen Garrett, 42, who used a wheelchair.

Ms. Brookshire told her niece that the street was already filling with water and that a neighbor who had promised them a ride to Dallas had never shown up.

“She says, ‘I’m calling you to tell you that I love you and to tell you bye,’ ” Ms. Mier recalled, “and I said, ‘Why? Where are you going?’ and she says ‘Nowhere. Me and Allen are going to drown.’ ”

Then Ms. Brookshire told her niece she was going to try to push her son through the rising water to a brick grocery store where she worked. They have not been seen since.

“Her house is just completely gone,” Ms. Mier said. “They are going to have to search through the debris and all of those little gullies along there.”

Angie Moore of Dallas also received word the morning of Sept. 12 that her relatives in Port Bolivar — a cousin, an aunt and her grandmother — were about to leave the peninsula.

Her aunt, Magdalena Strickland, a 49-year-old nurse, called at about 6:15 to say they were setting off in a car and a truck, but they never arrived, Ms. Moore said. The two vehicles were later found in Gilchrist, pushed off the road by floodwaters, she said. One was nearly submerged in sand; the other was thrust into brush on the roadside.

Since then, Ms. Moore has frantically called shelters run by the Red Cross and state agencies, trying to find her relatives. But Ms. Strickland remains missing, along with her mother, Marion Arrambide, 79, a retired nurse, and her son, Shane Williams, 33, a college student.

With each passing day it becomes more difficult to believe they are alive, Ms. Moore said.

“It’s not easy,” Ms. Moore said. “We are going on three weeks and — all three of them — we have heard nothing from any of them.”

    Three Weeks After Storm, a Grim Task of Recovery, NYT, 5.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/05missing.html

Swapping Land

for a Road to Somewhere

Divides Alaskans

September 27, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY and FELICITY BARRINGER

ANCHORAGE — Among the many bills Congress is considering before it recesses for the November elections is a proposed land swap between the State of Alaska and the federal government that would allow a gravel road to be built through a remote national wildlife refuge.

Environmental groups are lined up against the proposal, saying a road would threaten the pristine wilderness area. Building it would require cutting an approximately 200-acre strip through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge on the Alaska Peninsula, a resting place for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds and other animals.

Alaska officials, led by Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, say the road is needed to connect one tiny outpost, King Cove, to another, Cold Bay, so that the 800 residents of King Cove have reliable access, particularly in emergencies, to the all-weather airport across the water in Cold Bay.

The issue before Congress is whether to allow Alaska to swap about 43,000 acres of state land for the 200 or so acres in the Izembek refuge needed for the road, which would be a single lane and, though the exact route has not been determined, would require an estimated 17 miles of construction, at $1 million to $2 million per mile.

Though the proposed land swap has been a source of debate for years, some opponents are drawing new attention to it as an example of Congressional excess. They have compared it to the controversial Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan, Alaska, which was ultimately abandoned but has proved a thorn for the governor, Sarah Palin, in her campaign as the Republican nominee for vice president. Ms. Palin supports the land exchange and the proposed road through Izembek.

A road “is going to fragment and irreparably harm one of the most pristine and valuable wilderness and wetland areas in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, the associate director of the Wilderness Society’s Alaska office.

But supporters of the project say opponents are misrepresenting it. They point out that the basics of the proposed land swap have not been significantly altered since well before Ms. Palin took office, in December 2006. Furthermore, while the measure before Congress would give the Department of the Interior the authority to approve the project, no money would be set aside under the current bill and several caveats could delay or stop the project outright.

“There is no earmark request here,” said Ms. Murkowski, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate (Representative Don Young, a Republican and the state’s lone Congressional representative, sponsored it in the House). “There is none pending. There hasn’t been any that was asked for.”

Ms. Murkowski said Democrats had demanded significant changes, including measures to require more environmental study and to give the interior secretary discretion to determine whether the project was in the “public interest.”

Opponents, however, say the bill as they interpret it essentially directs the secretary to find that the proposal is in the public interest. If that were to happen, the road could be financed by the state using money from the federal Highway Trust Fund, instead of an earmark, according to state transportation officials and Ms. Murkowski’s office. The road is not currently in the state transportation financing plan.

Versions of the bill have cleared key committees in the House and Senate and await floor votes. However, given the economic bailout plans Congress is considering, the prospect of a measure passing this year “looks grim,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

If the road is not approved this year, it will not be the first time. In 1998, the Clinton administration opposed the road, being pushed by the Alaska delegation, and instead brokered a $37 million deal to provide a hovercraft across Cold Bay to improve transportation for medical evacuations; the plan also upgraded a medical center in King Cove. But the hovercraft just started operating last year, and residents say weather and high costs make its use unpredictable. The local government also says it costs about $100,000 a month to operate. Opponents of the road, however, say it, too, may be unusable in foul weather and they note that the hovercraft has conducted medical evacuations since it came into use. Residents say the road is a matter of public and economic health.

“They say those people over there will be killing all the ducks and ruining the environment and decimating the country,” said Mayor Stanley Mack of the Aleutians East Borough, much of whose population is Native Aleut and Yupik. “Where do you get off saying that? We’ve been out here for 4,000 years, protecting the country.”

The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge has long been overshadowed by its northern cousin, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the fight over building the gravel road has lacked the political tension of the fight over drilling for oil. But environmental groups have also long felt that building a road, on an isthmus between two wildlife-rich lagoons in the refuge, would threaten the welfare of a dwindling caribou herd and hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, including Pacific black brant and the threatened Steller’s eider.

The 43,000 acres of state land, plus 18,000 more that a local village corporation run by Alaska Natives has offered as part of the swap, cannot compensate, they say. “We’re talking about quality versus quantity,” Ms. Whittington-Evans said of the Wilderness Society.

Critics also note that the designated landing area for the hovercraft in King Cove was placed more than 15 miles away from town, and that the road there follows a course that could easily be extended to Cold Bay.

One local official confirmed that the hovercraft access road had been intentionally built with the goal of one day extending it through the refuge.

“Yes, this community isn’t backing down from building this road,” said the official, Robert S. Juettner, the administrator for the Aleutians East Borough. “And one day it will succeed.”
 

William Yardley reported from Anchorage, and Felicity Barringer from San Francisco.

    Swapping Land for a Road to Somewhere Divides Alaskans, NYT, 27.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/us/27road.html

Galveston Allows Residents to Return

September 24, 2008
Filed at 12:23 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- Thousands of people returned on Wednesday for the first time since their island city was blasted by Hurricane Ike nearly two weeks ago, choosing home over warnings that Galveston is ''broken'' and infested with germs and snakes.

Traffic was backed up for 10 miles on the one major highway leading into Galveston, but things appeared to go smoothly once the city of about 57,000 started letting people in about 6 a.m. Many people had been waiting in their cars along Interstate 45 since before dawn.

Police officers were stationed to direct traffic at major intersections where signal lights were ripped away by the hurricane's 110-mile-per-hour wind and 12-foot storm surge on Sept. 13.

Ruben Rosas, 74, one of those who had fled inland to San Antonio, joined the line on I-45 at about 3 a.m. Once he reached his first-floor apartment located on a bayou, he found that the walls and nearly all his possessions were gone. He did find a large cross that had been on his father's coffin and a small ''King of Dads'' statue his kids gave him when they were young.

''This is just sad, but the good thing is, I'm still around,'' Rosas said. ''I can recuperate these things sooner or later.''

City officials had prepared residents for such scenes, painting a dreary picture about living conditions on the island since Ike's devastation.

''When you come back it's not going to be the same Galveston Island you left,'' Mayor Pro Tem Danny Weber said Tuesday. ''It's been damaged. It's been broken.''

The mayor and others warned people not to return without tetanus shots and rat bait, and to be ready for swarms of mosquitoes and displaced snakes. Residents were told to bring their own water and to not even consider turning on the gas or flipping an electrical switch until one of the island's three remaining electrical inspectors can examine the property.

There is little drinkable water, limited food, sewer and medical facilities. A curfew is in effect nightly from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

''We do want to caution folks. There will be some struggles,'' said Marty Bahamonde, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

At least 61 deaths, 26 of them in Texas, were blamed on the Category 2 hurricane and its remnants.

Roughly 45,000 of the city's 57,000 residents fled Galveston Island, about 50 miles southeast of Houston, along with hundreds of thousands more from other sections of the Texas coast.

Residents of the island's most severely damaged area, on the island's west end, may visit their homes but are not being allowed to stay.

City Manager Steve LeBlanc said more hotels in Galveston are reopening and will be available for residents who return and find that their homes are uninhabitable, but he expects those rooms will be quickly snapped up.

City officials are working on a plan to provide temporary shelters on the mainland for people whose homes are not habitable. But LeBlanc stressed the shelters would be available only for a short time.

City leaders also are looking at setting up a shuttle service to take residents from the temporary shelters to their houses during the day so they can make repairs and clean up.

In spite of the problems, Galveston is slowly coming back to life with some stores and restaurants reopening, and there are other signs of recovery throughout southeast Texas.

CenterPoint Energy Inc. reported on Tuesday that 73 percent of its 2.26 million customers now had electricity. Entergy Texas reported that 89 percent of its nearly 393,000 customers affected by Hurricane Ike had power again.

On Tuesday, Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas and other city leaders went to Washington to ask lawmakers for nearly $2.5 billion in emergency funds.

Galveston leaders are optimistic their city will bounce back.

''This is our island. We are going to rebuild it and we are going to rebuild it bigger and better than it was,'' Weber said.

    Galveston Allows Residents to Return, NYT, 24.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ike-Galveston.html

After Hurricane Ike,

Finding the Coastline Rearranged,

Again

September 23, 2008
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

From the plane flying over the Gulf Islands National Seashore, scientists from the United States Geological Survey were scanning the ocean, trying to find Ship Island. Their maps and G.P.S. system told them they were over its eastern end, but there was no sign of it.

“I don’t see Ship anywhere,” said Asbury H. Sallenger, a oceanographer at the Geological Survey who was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat and had the best view. "On the map we see it, but all I see is breakers. There is just zip left of this thing."

Eventually, the scientists spotted the western part of Ship, but its eastern half had all but disappeared. A small patch of land and whitecaps breaking on underwater shoals were all that remained.

The damage was considerable, but it was the kind of land loss they would see often on their flight, which they made about 48 hours after Hurricane Ike struck the Gulf Coast, as part of the survey’s long-standing effort to track storm damage on the coast.

The geologists should not have been surprised. Scientists studying the way stormy weather erodes the coast have long been able to identify regions at risk for inundation if sea-level rise continues, an inevitability in a warming world.

For example, researchers have estimated that large stretches of another barrier chain, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, will vanish if seas rise more than two feet, which many scientists consider quite likely by 2100.

But on the Gulf Coast, “we are not talking 100 years,” Dr. Sallenger said, “we are talking three years,” the time since Hurricane Katrina and a parade of other storms, including Hurricanes Gustav and Ike this year, virtually destroyed several islands running west into Louisiana. Among them are the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier chain formed thousands of years ago in a now-defunct delta of the Mississippi River, and other islands in the Breton National Wildlife Refuge.

Storms and climate change are partly to blame. But the region as a whole is subsiding. And in some areas, some critics contend, federal dredging projects are robbing islands of sand.

The result is a chain of feeble island remnants. In many places, as Dr. Sallenger observed at one point, “there ain’t nothing here but white water.”

So Karen Morgan, a geologist at the Geological Survey making still photos of the landscape, at times found herself instructing the pilot, Rob Kent, to navigate not by a shoreline but by a line of white water breaking over the submerged shoals that are the islands’ remains. In some places, there were not even breakers to show where dry land had been.

These islands are uninhabited, but they are valuable nonetheless, and not just for storm protection. With their extensive dunes and vegetation, the islands were once an important nesting place for brown pelicans and a variety of other birds. In the last few years, Dr. Sallenger said, the Chandeleurs have lost about 85 percent of their land mass, and with this loss “the habitat for birds on the flyway has decreased by an enormous percentage.”

Of course, the islands have not vanished altogether. And the scientists, who fly this coast regularly, have many times seen islands in these chains erode in storms and then recover — at least somewhat. But that can happen only as long as their underlying platforms of marsh remain intact, providing a place for sand to collect. In many places today, those platforms are “frail and really beaten down,” Dr. Sallenger said.

Dr. Sallenger said the Geological Survey scientists would try to advise officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the refuge, what they could expect in the next 5 to 10 years. The outlook is grim.

Storms have already lopped miles off each end of the largest island in the Chandeleur chain. Will the islands bounce back? “We are going to look at the data again,” Dr. Sallenger said. “It looks very tenuous.”

The outlook for Ship Island is similarly daunting, in large part because of the difficulty of finding the necessary sand. “This is a very big operation to put this back together,” Dr. Sallenger said. “It’s not a small deal.”

    After Hurricane Ike, Finding the Coastline Rearranged, Again, NYT, 23.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/science/23islands.html

Some 640,000 Texans still without power

Tue Sep 23, 2008
9:24am EDT
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than 640,000 customers in Texas remained without power on Tuesday, 10 days after Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast before cutting a destructive path all the way to New York.

CenterPoint Energy Inc, the power company for most of the Houston area, still had about 616,000 customers in Texas without power early Tuesday, down from 2.15 million at the height of the storm.

Last week, CenterPoint predicted its team of restoration workers would return power to most of the Houston area by Thursday. But the company could not estimate when it will return service to homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast, including Galveston, where the storm made landfall early on September 13.

CenterPoint estimated the total cost for the restoration would be the range of $350 million to $500 million. The company said in a federal filing it would defer uninsured costs related to the storm and would seek legislation in Texas to allow for the securitization of storm restoration costs.

In addition, the company said it expected the outages would hurt its earnings for the third quarter and full year, primarily due to reduced revenues. CenterPoint however could not determine the exact amount of that impact at this time.

Entergy Corp, the other hard-hit power provider in Texas, said it had just 31,000 customers still without power in eastern Texas, down from 392,000 affected.

Entergy expects to restore power to all Texas customers over this weekend.

CenterPoint and Entergy Texas said Ike knocked out service to about 99 percent of their Texas customers.

Ike hit the Galveston-Houston area as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph. Overall, the storm cut power to more than 7.7 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia as it marched from Texas to the Northeast from September 12 to 19.

CenterPoint, of Houston, transmits and distributes electricity to more than 2.1 million customers in Texas and natural gas to more than 3 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Entergy, of New Orleans, owns and operates about 30,000 MW of generating capacity, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes power to 2.7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by John Picinich)

    Some 640,000 Texans still without power, R, 23.9.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE48M11X20080923

Galveston lays out plan

for residents' return

September 20, 2008
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- Authorities laid out a plan Friday -- a week after Hurricane Ike began lashing the Texas coast with 110-mph winds and relentless storm surge -- to let about 45,000 anxious evacuees back onto Galveston Island for good.

It will be another week before that happens, however, as crews were only beginning to get basic services restored on the crippled barrier island.

A lone pump was back on at a gas station about two blocks behind the Galveston seawall Friday. Cell phone service was mostly restored and power was gradually coming back on.

Residents will be allowed to return in phases, starting from the least damaged areas, primarily behind the seawall on the east side of the island, then gradually out to the heavily damaged west end, city manager Steve LeBlanc said.

About 90 people a day were being treated for minor injuries at the University of Texas Medical Branch, but the island's only hospital was still days or weeks away from admitting people. About 14 people a day with more serious injuries had been sent by ambulance or helicopter to hospitals on the mainland, and health officials cautioned that the island was still vulnerable to disease.

''If our residents are injured severely, we just don't have a good capacity to care for them today,'' hospital president David Callendar said. ''It will really be some time before Galveston is what I would say, in my own words, a healthy enough place to sustain a population.''

Another obstacle to reopening the island is its crippled water system. More water is flowing out of the city's pipes than is flowing in.

Authorities have long since finished searching for bodies on Galveston Island and the worse-off Bolivar Peninsula, though they cautioned more could be found. Authorities had blamed 57 deaths in the U.S. on Ike, 23 of them in Texas.

County Judge Jim Yarbrough, the county's highest elected official, said 60 state troopers were patrolling the heavily damaged peninsula.

''That additional security would at least give some comfort to people who are worried about looters,'' he said.

While an evacuation order is still in effect for about 80 percent of Bolivar Peninsula, Yarbrough backed off his vow earlier this week to forcefully remove residents if necessary to clear the way for repair teams. So many people already left on their own -- only about 35 remain -- and with better access to the peninsula officials are able to get those people the food, water and supplies they need.

Authorities plan to allow residents back to the peninsula next week to examine their property. Because the main road is impassible in many spots, they'll load people up in dump trucks and other heavy vehicles.

State Rep. Craig Eiland, who represents Galveston, said officials are trying to gather the thousands of cattle that have been roaming free since the storm surge receded. The water that remains is so salty it could kill animals that drink it, and the grass they would normally eat likewise has been tainted, he said.

About 1.4 million customers remained without power statewide, including about half of the Houston area. The power was back on for about 1 million customers in the metro region, however, and life looked increasingly normal in the nation's fourth-largest city. More stores were open, and police reopened downtown streets that they had blocked off after the storm blew out skyscraper windows.

NASA said Friday that flight control of the International Space Station was returning to the Johnson Space Center, which shut down a few days before Ike's strike but did not sustain significant damage.

More than 1 million people evacuated the Texas coast as Ike steamed across the Gulf of Mexico. Gov. Rick Perry said 20,500 people were still staying in 190 shelters Friday. About 135,500 families had qualified for government-funded hotels, though less than 9,000 were checked in, said Richard Scorza, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The federal relief effort has delivered hundreds of trucks of ice, water and food to more than 5 million people in the region.

Among those accepting a hand was Cheryl Harwell, who holed up in an empty hotel as Ike devastated the Bolivar Peninsula community of Crystal Beach. She ignored a mandatory evacuation order last week and suggested she wouldn't be leaving anytime soon.

''I got everything I need here,'' said Harwell, 50, as she sat on the hotel's second-floor balcony with her husband and a friend.

Destruction surrounded them, but their second-floor abode was dry and tidy, complete with clean linen, bottled water and beer.

''We're happy here,'' said Harwell's husband, Armando Briones. ''We've got plenty of cigarettes and plenty of food.''

If they need something, they simply flag down the National Guard, which has been making daily checks.

------

Associated Press writers John McFarland, Chris Duncan and Paul J. Weber in Houston and Michelle Roberts in San Antonio contributed to this report.

    Galveston lays out plan for residents' return, NYT, 20.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ike.html

Texas a grim tableau

nearly a week after Ike

September 19, 2008
Filed at 10:30 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- It's been nearly a week since Hurricane Ike bulled ashore, and the images of once-bustling coastal Texas communities reduced to only a faint shadow of their old selves are no less staggering.

Survivors traipsing past debris piled higher than their heads. Loose livestock grazing beneath downed power lines. Before-and-after shots of whole neighborhoods washed away. Scores of people taking on the drudgery of making it all livable again for weary and anxious evacuees still waiting to come home.

''The city of Galveston is not in ruins,'' Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas said Thursday, striking a defiant tone.

Then she ceded the podium to city manager Steve LeBlanc, who said Galveston basically is on life support.

There's some power to the only hospital, but not enough. Cell phone service is improving, which helps repair crews coordinate, but coverage is still spotty. More water is flowing out of the city's pipes than is flowing in.

''Our water system is bleeding,'' LeBlanc said.

At the very least, the barrier island community isn't ready for the return of the 45,000 who heeded orders to flee, about three-fourths of the population. Officials pleaded with evacuees to sit tight to give workers time to stabilize basic services.

''By staying away and being patient, you are making it possible for us to get you home in a week or so, instead of the months it would take if the city's infrastructure were more overwhelmed at this point,'' Thomas said.

Galveston Island remained closed, as did the worse-off Bolivar Peninsula. Search teams pulled out of both areas this week after sweeping every house, authorities said.

To the northwest, life took more steps toward normalcy in Houston, where traffic picked up on the downtown streets. Flight control of the International Space Station was to return Friday to the Johnson Space Center, which shut down a few days before Ike's strike.

CenterPoint Energy said it had restored power to nearly 900,000 homes, and the utility was fast approaching the point where more people in the nation's fourth-largest city would be with electricity than without. About 1.5 million are still without power statewide.

More than 1 million people evacuated the Texas coast as Ike steamed across the Gulf of Mexico. Gov. Rick Perry said 22,000 people were still living in more than 200 shelters. Ike's death toll in the U.S. stood at 56, with 22 in Texas, though authorities cautioned that more victims could be found.

The Interior Department said Thursday that Ike destroyed at least 49 of the more than 3,800 offshore oil or natural gas production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and some may not be rebuilt. The damaged platforms accounted for tiny percentages of the Gulf's daily output of oil and natural gas.

The federal relief effort has delivered hundreds of trucks of ice, water and food to more than 5 million people in the region. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had handed out 2.5 million liters of water, 2 million meals and 100,000 tarps.

Among those accepting a hand was Cheryl Harwell, who holed up in an empty hotel as Ike devastated the Bolivar Peninsula community of Crystal Beach. She ignored a mandatory evacuation order six days ago, and suggested she wouldn't be leaving anytime soon.

''I got everything I need here,'' said Harwell, 50, as she sat on the hotel's second-floor balcony with her husband and a friend.

Destruction surrounded them, but their second-floor abode was dry and tidy, complete with clean linen, bottled water and beer.

''We're happy here,'' said Harwell's husband, Armando Briones. ''We've got plenty of cigarettes and plenty of food.''

If they need something, they simply flag down the National Guard, which has been making daily checks.

Back on the mainland, the Red Cross began to close some shelters outside the greater Houston area, though it was still accepting evacuees closer to the most damaged spots, said Jana Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the agency.

''People will come home and realize that their home is not livable, and check back into the shelters,'' she said.

That's what happened to Virginia Collins, a nurse's assistant who left her home in Houston to stay with family in Denton during the storm. When the coast was clear, she went home to find her ceiling caved in, insulation spilling from the walls and black mold spreading around the house -- a place she moved after Hurricane Rita destroyed her Port Arthur home three years ago.

With her Houston home uninhabitable, she was at the city's convention center looking for shelter Thursday.

''I was OK until I got back here,'' Collins said.

------

Juan A. Lozano contributed from Crystal Beach. Associated Press writers Andre Coe in Galveston, Michelle Roberts in San Antonio and Chris Duncan and Paul J. Weber in Houston contributed to this report.

    Texas a grim tableau nearly a week after Ike, NYT, 19.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ike.html

Conservancy Buys Slice of Adirondacks

September 19, 2008
The New York Times
By MARTIN ESPINOZA

A 14,600-acre piece of the Adirondacks long prized by environmentalists for its forests and wetlands, including a pond where Ralph Waldo Emerson led a “philosophers’ camp,” was purchased on Thursday by a preservation group for $16 million, the group said.

The property, which had been owned by a Vermont family for 56 years, will not immediately be open to the public because of leases for recreational hunting and fishing that will last several more years. But the group, the Nature Conservancy, said the purchase meant that the land would be protected and ultimately added to the Adirondack Forest Preserve in Adirondack Park.

“This is one for the history books,” said Michael T. Carr, executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy. “We’re redrawing the conservation map of the Adirondacks.”

The property, southwest of Lake Placid and on the boundary of the High Peaks Wilderness Area, was until Thursday among more than 2.6 million acres of unprotected privately owned land in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park.

Roughly the size of Vermont, the park includes 103 towns and villages and has an estimated year-round population of 131,000 residents, said Keith McKeever, a spokesman for the Adirondack Park Agency.

The land bought on Thursday includes Follensby Pond, the site of a famous 1858 gathering known as the Philosophers’ Camp, where Emerson and other Boston-area intellectuals spent a month fishing, hunting, painting and writing. Among those joining Emerson were the painter William James Stillman, the poet James Russell Lowell and the scientist Louis Agassiz.

The gathering took place at a time when Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others were redefining attitudes toward nature.

“It was an early moment in the development of the idea that there was something sublime about nature,” said Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. “Nature was starting to play a less utilitarian function and a more aesthetic and intellectual one.”

Mr. McKibben, who recently edited a large anthology of environmental essays, “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” said the early work of people like Thoreau was one of the reasons why the State of New York began protecting the Adirondacks 100 years ago.

He called the Adirondacks one of the world’s greatest examples of ecological restoration, because, unlike Yellowstone National Park, there are many communities existing alongside wilderness. In many ways, Follensby Pond is in much better ecological shape now than it was when Emerson and others camped there, Mr. McKibben said.

“It’s so heartening to me that that momentum continues in New York State,” he said, “even while some of the rest of the country is back to chanting, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ New York has done it right for a very long time.”

The driving force behind the purchase was the property’s ecology, its pristine hydrological systems and high-quality forest lands adjacent to wilderness, Mr. Carr said.

“But we cannot deny the romance and the mystique of Emerson and his colleagues, Stillman, Agassiz, at the Philosophers’ Camp,” he said.

Through an agreement between the sellers, the McCormick family of Manchester, Vt., the recreational leases associated with much of the property, common among large privately owned forestlands, will continue for several years. Revenue from the leases will go toward paying property taxes and other “caring costs,” said Connie Prickett, a spokeswoman for the conservancy.

The state had expressed a desire to buy the land in the past, but it was stymied by a lack of preservation money. The Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy had to borrow the $16 million from its larger parent organization. The bulk of the loan will be paid back when the property is finally sold, most likely to the state.

The commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, Pete Grannis, declined to comment, apart from a statement issued through the Nature Conservancy: “We applaud the McCormicks and the Nature Conservancy for taking measures to protect this special place.”

The seller, John S. McCormick, also gave a statement through the group: “It is a beautiful piece of property, and the solitude it offers is absolute. We’ve had so many wonderful experiences there.”

The purchase was welcome news to John F. Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, an environmental advocacy organization based in the park. Mr. Sheehan said the property had been well tended not only by the McCormick family, but also by generations of families that have been leasing portions of the property for recreational use.

Mr. Sheehan said that the council favored having the state take over the property in the future, but that “it doesn’t have to happen tomorrow, because the property has been extremely well cared for.”

Mr. Carr said the chapter’s investments had led to the protection of 571,000 acres in the region. At the moment, it is trying to get the state to buy 70,000 of a 161,000-acre property it purchased last year. An additional 90,500 acres are being offered for sale to timber investors, which would allow logging under strict sustainable forestry standards. The conservancy has said that the sale is necessary to help pay for land preservation.

    Conservancy Buys Slice of Adirondacks, NYT, 19.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/nyregion/19adirondacks.html

Crews From 31 States in Texas

to Restore Power

September 17, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR

HOUSTON — An army of line crews from 31 states has converged on eastern Texas to help deal with the largest power failure in this large state’s history.

In the wake of Hurricane Ike, officials fear it could take weeks to restore power in some places, like Galveston and the towns near the Louisiana border, because major transmission lines have been knocked out, substations have been swamped and trees have fallen on neighborhood lines.

“It’s a rare event when you will see physical damage to most of the grid,” said Mayor Bill White of Houston. “Hurricane Ike, with our power company, was that kind of event.”

About two million customers remained without power across eastern Texas as of Tuesday afternoon, three days after the hurricane hit.

Hundreds of thousands of students were still out of school, mail delivery was suspended, most businesses had yet to open, hundreds of intersections lacked traffic signals and government agencies were struggling to provide services. Some hospitals, including the main hospital in Galveston, operated on generators.

Entergy, the utility that serves the area east of Houston, has restored power to about 40,000 of its 395,000 customers. CenterPoint, which serves Houston and Galveston, had made more progress, but still had 1.5 million customers in the dark.

In Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city and the center of its oil industry, signs of prolonged blackout are everywhere — in long lines at the few gasoline stations with power to run pumps, in the huge demand for ice at government food-distribution centers, in the low number of grocery stores that are open, and in the grumbling of ordinary citizens. Refineries in Texas remain closed.

Most of Houston was coping without refrigerators, air-conditioners and pumps to provide water pressure both for drinking water and for sewage plants.

“I got no ice, no water, no electricity, no nothing,” said Maria Phillips, 25, of the Houston suburb of Baytown, echoing the comments of many others. Ms. Phillips’s house, which had been flooded, was nearly uninhabitable, she said.

President Bush, who visited Houston and Galveston on Tuesday, discussed the blackout with local officials.

“Obviously people are concerned about electricity,” Mr. Bush said, “and what I look for, is there enough help to get these energy companies to do what they instinctively want to do, which is get the grid up and running?”

Throughout the day, tree-trimming crews and line workers were arriving from states as far away as California and Pennsylvania to help the local utilities, which had already deployed about 8,500 workers.

Beleaguered residents, many of whom have been without power since Friday, treated the utility workers like heroes.

Near Ball High School in Galveston late Tuesday afternoon, two line workers in a cherry picker worked on a leaning, splintered power pole. A crane helped anchor the pole, while one of the men cut it in half with a chain saw. A crowd gathered to watch.

Herman Marino, a line worker from Denver, said the damage to Galveston’s power lines was the worst he had ever seen, including the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“That wasn’t as bad as this one,” said Mr. Marino, 48. “This is pretty good damage.”

In eastern Texas, near the Louisiana border, the hurricane knocked down more than 100 towers holding high-voltage transmission lines, damaged 272 substations and flooded the Sabine Power Station in Bridge City, driving snakes and wild animals into the plant, officials at Entergy Texas said.

The infrastructure around Houston fared better. Most high-voltage lines remained intact and the main damage was to the distribution lines in neighborhoods, officials at CenterPoint said. On Tuesday, about 24 high voltage transmission lines were still out of service, five of them running into Galveston.

In part because there is no electricity, Galveston officials declared their battered island city on the brink of a public health disaster. Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas asked residents to stay away.

A program that had allowed residents to return briefly to check on their properties was suspended after a crush of residents descended within a few hours, said the city manager, Steve LeBlanc. “We were totally overwhelmed.” Mr. LeBlanc said. “We expected a lot of people to come back, but it was like all at once.”

He said the policy would be re-evaluated, adding, “We’re really going to go backwards if everybody’s here and we’re having to deal with that.”

For some residents, the days and nights without electricity have become more and more intolerable.

“It’s very hard,” said Phoebe Crump, 33, a homemaker. “You don’t know where you are going to step. You can’t see where your food’s at. You don’t know where your water is at. You can’t see nothing.”

“Life is hard enough,” Ms. Crump added. “It’s harder without power.”

As crews hacked away at downed trees and replaced blown-out transformers and cut lines, state and local officials contended with a plethora of other problems, among them a tiger on the loose.

James D. Yarbrough, the Galveston County judge, said a pet tiger, well known to locals, had escaped during the storm and was wandering the ruins of houses on Bolivar Peninsula. “I understand he’s hungry, so we are staying away from him,” Mr. Yarbrough said.

Officials reported six more deaths in Texas attributed to the storm, bringing the toll in this state alone to 15. Some of the latest victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning from gasoline-powered generators; others died trying to cut up fallen trees and in fires caused by candles.

More than 33,000 people, meantime, remained housed in temporary shelters around Texas, waiting for the green light to go home, a signal some local officials said might not come for weeks.

Mr. Bush, making his third trip to inspect storm damage in two weeks, said the government had a plan in place to reimburse displaced residents for hotels for at least the next 30 days. He also announced that the federal government would absorb the cost of removing debris.

A former Texas governor, Mr. Bush took a rapid helicopter tour of the devastated areas around Galveston, then jetted back to Washington to meet with economic advisers about a different sort of storm on Wall Street.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Houston, and Thayer Evans from Galveston, Tex.

    Crews From 31 States in Texas to Restore Power, NYT, 17.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/us/17ike.html?hp

Stuck in Galveston,

a Park Bench for a Shelter

September 14, 2008
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA and JOHN SCHWARTZ

GALVESTON, Tex. — Those who make the barrier island here their home know this: Nature tries to wipe them out now and then. They live with that knowledge every day, though it does not come to the forefront of their thinking unless a storm is on the way.

The threat is anything but theoretical, as Daryl Thompson learned Saturday after making what he admitted was a bad decision.

Not only did he choose to ride out Hurricane Ike, but he did so outdoors. “I thought about going to the shelter,” Mr. Thompson, who is homeless, said as he pushed his bike with two large water-logged bags balanced on top. “But I waited too long, then I was trapped.”

Mr. Thompson said that at one point the wind was so strong that he kept getting blown off his feet. So he lay down underneath a park bench.

“I thought I might die,” he said. “This thing tossed me like a salad.”

The storm tossed much of the island the same way.

Along the seaway, wooden debris was stacked up like barricades, and things were askew in that way that only big storms can accomplish.

Dozens of palm trees were bent over. A boat sat in the middle of a road near 49th Street, even though no water flowed down the street. At the cemetery, statues of saints and the heads of white tombstones barely extended above muddy water.

Coast Guard helicopters buzzed overhead in an effort to check on rescue missions in response to more than 100 distress calls that came in during the night.

Late Saturday, city officials said there were no confirmed deaths, even though at least 17 buildings were destroyed. Property damage was “in the millions, if not hundreds of millions,” said the city manager, Steve LeBlanc.

For residents of Galveston, which lost 6,000 people in 1900 in the nation’s worst natural disaster, there is a grim calculation with each storm: Stay or go?

John Dundee, whose family has lived on the island for five generations, decided to stick out this storm after the misery of the 2005 evacuation for Hurricane Rita.

“My wife and I sat up in traffic for 27 hours, just trying to make it to my children’s house in Waco,” Mr. Dundee said. This time, they decided, “we felt we might be safer here than out on the highway,” and they left their home on the unprotected west end of the island for his mother’s home closer to town.

But then the surge predictions grew more and more ominous.

“We went back and forth and back and forth,” Mr. Dundee said. By the time they decided to go, the water on the streets was waist deep — too much even for his Jeep.

Speaking from his home Saturday morning, a clearly relieved Mr. Dundee said, “We got beat up pretty bad, but everybody got through fine.”

On Friday night, just hours before Hurricane Ike came ashore, Galveston’s mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, spoke by cellphone from the San Luis Hotel about why people stay in such a place, and why people go there.

Galveston has been on a building binge, with more than $6 billion in recent development — even after Hurricane Katrina underscored the risks of the Gulf Coast. The city’s economy is on an upswing. And, as Ms. Thomas likes to say, “It only took 100 years.”

Ms. Thomas’s grandfather was I. H. Kempner, one of the men who helped revive the city after the storm in 1900. She said the risk was “just part of living here.”

“The gulf sits here,” Ms. Thomas said, “and at any moment — like today — it can rise up in wrath and overwhelm you.”

“We’ve lost a lot today,” she added. “But you know that’s a part of our history.”

Other residents, too, said they would ride the storm out again if given the option.

Ivy and Mike Gonzales said they and their home had made it as they wandered out from the house, on Broadway. They added that it would have been much easier had the city not turned off the water and gas.

“We understand that they needed to take precautions, but I need a cup of coffee something vicious and the toilet needs flushing,” said Ms. Gonzalez, adding that a couple of shingles had blown off their home but there was no other damage.

The police had their frustrations, too. Southwest of Galveston, officers said that one man from Surfside Beach was the only resident who did not evacuate the highly damaged area. He was drunk when they reached him on Saturday morning, the authorities said.

“We have a lot more important things to do, but we have our duty, too,” said a city police officer who asked not to be named.

As the skies cleared Saturday, a surprising number of people meandered through the streets, greeting one another with proud smiles, looking for working telephones or trying to get a pack of cigarettes.

Along Broadway and 29th, two teenagers kayaked on their way to check on a friend’s house. Another boy walked up 21st Street with a fishing pole. “I’m not trying to catch anything,” said the boy, Nick Parker, 11. “I’m just making sure there are no water moccasins.”

Nick explained that he and his parents had waited too long to evacuate and had been trapped in their home. The water flooded their basement, he said, but no one was hurt. “Mostly, I’m here looking for someone else to play with,” he said. “Hurricanes are boring. Maybe it’s time to open the schools back up.”

At Ball High School, which served as an evacuation shelter and where nearly 300 people rode out the storm, Michael W. Fox, who was staying at the shelter, said that all had gone smoothly, even though around midnight the first-floor auditorium was evacuated to the second floor as water flooded the building.

“It was civil and all, but by morning all anyone wanted to do was get out and check on their homes to see how bad things looked,” Mr. Fox said as he waded through waist-deep water back to his home.

As she began pulling down the plywood from the front of her house on Avenue O, less than a half-mile from the water, Sara Rampton, 54, said her house was fine.

But tears began streaming down her face as she tried to explain what she did lose.

“My dog ran, and I lost my only photograph of my grandfather,” said Ms. Rampton, explaining that as she tried to take her German shepherd, Gabriel, to a shelter when the storm started, he got spooked by the winds and bolted out the front door. She added that during the storm, water flooded part of her living room and the wind blew down her only photograph of her deceased grandfather.

“You can replace everything else, and I’m sure they will rebuild,” she said, wiping her face. “They can’t rebuild all the personal things that get lost.”

In 1900, the Great Storm, as it became known in the days before each hurricane was given a human name, changed one of the nation’s most prosperous cities into a backwater.

That storm stopped what seemed to be an inexorable rise for Galveston, which considered itself a rival to New Orleans. It was the city with an opera house that had hosted Sarah Bernhardt, the city with the state’s first telephone and its first electric light. And then, the storm.

“When I was growing up, people didn’t like to talk about it,” said Paul Burka, the senior executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine and a “B.O.I.” — clubby old Galveston’s abbreviation for “born on the island.” The 1900 storm “was like a skeleton in the family closet,” he said, because “that was the day that Galveston lost its destiny.”

But the city did not stand still. Civic leaders like Kempner and John Sealy traveled to New York and Washington to persuade government and financial leaders that the island would soon be open for business again and to establish lines of credit.

Enormous undertakings followed. Galveston began building a seawall that is now 10 miles long and some 17 feet high, to break storm surges from the Gulf of Mexico. Workers raised the city’s buildings on jacks — some by more than 10 feet — and filled in the space underneath with dredged soil.

The city survived, but it did not boom again. Its economic prominence was quickly grabbed by Houston, which dug a deepwater ship channel that allowed business to bypass the risky island port.

But life went on, and Galvestonians came to think of the threat of occasional hurricanes as something they could live with.

Ian Urbina reported from Galveston, Tex., and John Schwartz from New York. Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Galveston.

    Stuck in Galveston, a Park Bench for a Shelter, NYT, 14.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/14scene.html?hp

Hurricane Damage

Is Extensive in Texas

September 14, 2008
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JAMES C. MCKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Hurricane Ike barreled across a wide swath of Texas on Saturday, deluging the city of Galveston with a wall of water, flooding coastal towns and leaving extensive damage across metropolitan Houston.

With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers here, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows, sending shattered glass and debris across the nation’s fourth-largest city, with a population of 2.2 million.

The storm came ashore on Galveston Island, which in 1900 suffered one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States. Winds covered the main highway with a layer of boats and debris, shutting it down. In Orange, Tex., near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.

Yet officials expressed relief that the damage was not as catastrophic as federal and state officials had warned it would be.

“Fortunately the worst-case scenario did not occur,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said at a news conference on Saturday. “The good news is the surge was not as big as we thought it would be.”

There were reports of as many as four people killed, but it could take days to search flooded homes to assess the full impact of the storm, officials said.

The authorities said the hurricane could still prove to be the most punishing storm to hit the area since Hurricane Alicia did 25 years ago.

Almost the entire metropolitan area lost power, and authorities said more than three million people were trying to manage in the dark. Utility officials say it could be weeks before power is restored throughout the region.

The magnitude of the power loss and the flooding raised the possibility that several major oil refineries would take more than a week to reopen. As a result, gasoline prices will probably spike around the country, even if oil prices continue to ease on international markets. Overnight, prices rose an average of 5 cents a gallon, to $3.73 for regular gasoline, according to AAA.

Officials at refining companies said early damage reports were encouraging because the center of the storm missed the refineries. The surge of water into Galveston’s shipping channel, an important depot for imported oil, was not as strong as many had feared, and officials hope to reopen it early in the week if no major obstacles are blocking shipping lanes.

The expectations at nightfall Friday that a virtual tsunami of 20-foot waves would crash directly into Galveston, a city of 57,000, were fortunately dashed after midnight when the eye of the hurricane hit shore. City officials estimated the seas rose about 12 feet, though some tide gauges showed a 15-foot rise, and federal officials said it would take time to determine the exact number.

Whatever the height of the surge, longtime residents of Galveston said the damage was still the worst they had seen.

More than two million people evacuated coastal areas of Texas and Louisiana before the storm struck. But the authorities estimated that more than 100,000 people throughout the region, including 20,000 in Galveston, had disregarded mandatory evacuation orders.

At least 100,000 homes were inundated by surging waters, while isolated fires broke out around the region when trees and flying objects fell on electrical transformers, causing sparks.

In Houston, only the downtown area and the medical center section had power as of Saturday evening.

“It’s going to be weeks before we get power to the last customers,” said Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for Entergy Texas, the primary electricity provider between Houston and the Louisiana border. Mr. Rodgers said damage to the electric grid was much more widespread than after Hurricane Rita, which hit the area in 2005.

President Bush issued a major disaster declaration for 29 counties in Texas and said federal officials were prepared to help with recovery efforts.

“Obviously, this is a huge storm that is causing a lot of damage not only in Texas but also in parts of Louisiana,” Mr. Bush said. “Some people didn’t evacuate when asked, and I’ve been briefed on the rescue teams there in the area. They’re prepared to move as soon as weather conditions permit.”

Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, canceled an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” aides said, because he felt it would be inappropriate.

Civic leaders asked residents to conserve water and call 911 only in life-or-death situations.

“We don’t know what we’re going to find,” said Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas of Galveston, according to The Houston Chronicle. “We hope we’ll find that the people who didn’t leave here are alive and well.”

Despite the devastating flooding in Galveston, experts said the storm surge had not been as severe as some predicted.

Benton McGee, a hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey, told The Associated Press that the surge at Galveston, where the storm made landfall, was about 11 feet. Forecasters had predicted a surge of up to 25 feet.

But Stacey Stewart, a senior hurricane analyst at the National Hurricane Center, defended the government’s predictions of a 15- to 20-foot surge and said it would take time to determine the exact rise in sea level.

“I wouldn’t go out and say that surge values weren’t as high as predicted,” he said. “We have received reports of 15 feet and the sea wall being topped.”

Mr. Stewart said a shift in the storm’s track to the north just before landfall might have kept the rise in sea levels on the lower side of what had been forecast.

The storm moved through the region more quickly than some previous hurricanes and tropical storms, limiting flooding. By early afternoon, the National Hurricane Center had downgraded Hurricane Ike to a tropical storm.

Mike Varela, chief of the Galveston Fire Department, said flooding was 8- to 10-feet deep in some areas of the city. “The low-lying neighborhoods are extremely flooded right now,” Chief Varela said.

Twenty-two men aboard a crippled freighter, which was adrift off the coast of Galveston when the hurricane hit, came through the storm safely, the Coast Guard said.

Initial reports from residential neighborhoods around Houston suggested that flooding and property damage were not as serious as some had feared early in the morning after hearing reports from downtown, where windows were shattered on skyscrapers and hotels.

At Reliant Park, in southwest Houston, the storm tore chunks from the retractable roof of the football stadium, the park’s president and general manager told The Associated Press. The game between the Texans and the Baltimore Ravens scheduled for Monday night would probably have to be postponed, he said.

Late in the afternoon, Air Force helicopters began plucking people out of flooded homes in Galveston and carrying them to shelters on the mainland.

Joyce Williams, 58, arrived on the first chopper with her 80-year-old mother, Eunice Haley, who had spent the night in a house with four feet of water on the ground floor. Ms. Williams was trying to get her mother out of the swamped house when she saw the helicopter and waved.

Steven Rushing, who had tried to ride out the storm at his Galveston home with his family, eventually left by boat. Mr. Rushing, six relatives and two dogs wound up at a hotel in Galveston.

“I know my house was dry at 11 o’clock, and at 12:30 a.m., we were floating on the couch putting lifejackets on,” he said. Once the water reached the television, four feet off the floor, Mr. Rushing said, he retrieved his boat from the garage and loaded his family into it.

“I didn’t keep my boat there to plan on evacuating because I didn’t plan on the water getting that high, but I sure am glad it was there,” he said.


Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Galveston, Tex., and Rick Rojas from College Station, Tex.

    Hurricane Damage Is Extensive in Texas, NYT, 14.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/14ike.html?hp

A Million Flee

as Huge Storm

Begins to Hit Texas Coast

September 13, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and IAN URBINA

HOUSTON — Hurricane Ike lashed the Texas coast Friday night with 110 mile-per-hour winds as it churned toward this city and threatened to devastate Galveston and other towns along the Gulf of Mexico with a wall of seawater 20 feet high.

By late in the day, more than a million Texans had left their homes for safer places inland, but tens of thousands decided to tough it out, and the authorities feared that those people had put their lives at risk. Officials in Galveston, on a vulnerable barrier island, estimated that 40 percent of the city’s 57,000 residents had ignored an order to evacuate.

As many as 100,000 homes could be inundated by the wall of water expected to hit the coast, federal officials warned, and millions of people could be left without electricity.

“The size, strength and current path of the storm have the potential to produce catastrophic — let me repeat that — catastrophic effects and to threaten the lives and safety of citizens along the Texas coast and the western part of Louisiana,” the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, said at a news conference in the afternoon.

Forecasters said the giant storm — nearly 600 miles wide — would send water surging up Galveston Bay and into the Houston Ship Channel, the nation’s second-busiest port. It was also expected to swamp neighborhoods along the seven bayous that thread through Houston.

Long before it was to come ashore, Hurricane Ike caused flooding all along the coast. It shut down oil refineries, endangered a freighter at sea and destroyed a pier in Galveston.

Emergency officials said that there were sporadic house fires throughout Galveston, mostly traced to transformers. The 61st Street pier was washed away, and several buildings lining the seawall had partly collapsed.

Galveston was mostly without power Friday night. Most of the buildings in downtown were flooded, as was the western part of the island. About five blocks inland from the seawall, streets were so submerged by 9 p.m. that the water had reached stop signs. Firefighters picked up more than 300 people who were wading through the streets after being forced from their homes.

One hurricane expert, Jeff Masters, warned that the storm “stands poised to become one of the most damaging hurricanes of all time” because of its vast size.

Officials said they were particularly worried about people in coastal towns who ignored evacuation orders. On the Bolivar Peninsula, a spit of land on the east side of Houston at the mouth of Galveston Bay, the sudden rush of seawater caught at least 200 people off guard, covering the only road. The Coast Guard rescued 96 people with helicopters but had to leave 100 behind after winds grew too strong to fly, the Coast Guard said.

Dr. Masters, who runs the Weather Underground Web site, said Hurricane Ike could end up being much larger and more powerful than Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged New Orleans in 2005. He also predicted that it would cause “the largest and longest-lived power outage in Texas history.”

The eye of the storm was forecast to make landfall after midnight just southwest of Galveston and to push a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet over the island’s seawall, into Galveston Bay and up the Houston Ship Channel — a nightmare for the nation’s fourth-largest metropolis and its oil industry.

President Bush, speaking in Oklahoma City, said he was “deeply concerned” about the potential effects of the hurricane.

“The federal government will not only help with the prestorm strategy,” Mr. Bush said, “but once this storm passes, we’ll be working with state and local authorities to help people recover as quickly as possible.”

The winds at the eye wall of the hurricane were about 110 miles per hour, but it was the storm’s size that made it dangerous, causing 50-foot waves as it swept over shallow gulf waters.

Federal forecasters said the storm’s size meant it would produce high storm surges along the coast in western Louisiana and eastern Texas, as well as 5 to 10 inches of rain.

Officials in Houston urged most residents who do not live in coastal regions near the bay to remain in their homes.

The decision was a calculated risk. Local officials hope to avoid the chaos and clogged highways that occurred after residents were ordered to evacuate Houston when Hurricane Rita threatened the city in 2005.

Frantic Galveston officials opened a shelter at a high school as more and more residents began to request help, Steve LeBlanc, the city manager, said in a televised interview late in the afternoon.

“It’s unfortunate that the warning we sent — the mayor’s mandatory evacuation — was not heeded,” Mr. LeBlanc said, adding that there was almost 100 percent compliance during Hurricane Rita.

The storm shuttered at least 17 refineries in the Houston area, including those owned by ExxonMobil, Valero, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell, which alone handle about 13 percent of the nation’s oil processing needs.

Energy experts said it would take at least a week for the refineries to begin anything close to normal operations, and flood damage or power failures could mean further delays. Damage to the Port of Houston could disrupt oil imports and tighten oil and gasoline supplies further.

Gasoline prices have surged around the country, especially in the Gulf Coast region, where prices for regular unleaded at some stations climbed by at least 20 cents in the last day or two.

The Coast Guard reported that the situation at sea had become so dangerous that it could not evacuate 36 men adrift on a 584-foot freighter, the Antalina, registered in Cyprus, which was about 90 miles off the Galveston coast.

The ship was in the direct path of Hurricane Ike. The crew, which had lost power about 4 a.m. Friday, will have to tough it out until after the storm, the Coast Guard said.

Mayor Bill White of Houston said the Police Department and the Fire Department were gearing up to rescue people who were stranded by floods.

The federal government has moved about 3,500 rescue workers into place just outside the storm’s expected path, along with about 2.4 million quarts of water, 2 million military meals and 203 generators to power hospitals and other critical government buildings, said Debbie Wing, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The state has also sent in 7,500 national guardsmen.

Throughout the morning, Mr. White and Judge Ed Emmett of Harris County encouraged people to leave low-lying areas.

“Our biggest concern is getting every human being out of the storm surge area,” Mr. Emmett said. “Then we will get people indoors and off the highway when the heavy winds come.”

In Galveston, despite the order to leave, officials decided not to evacuate the 1,000 prisoners at the county jail for security reasons.

The effects of the storm were being felt as far away as New Orleans, where winds from Hurricane Ike’s outer bands gusted Friday morning at more than 50 m.p.h. The storm surge forced the closing of floodgates on drainage canals in the city, and people in coastal communities at its suburban edge were ordered to evacuate. The storm’s surge flooded roads and streets around coastal Louisiana on Friday afternoon, with the small communities close to the Gulf of Mexico reporting as much as two feet of water in some places.

In low-lying Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, as much as seven feet of water was reported on State Highway 39 by a state official.

At a shelter in Galveston, some 185 people who had sought refuge at nightfall said the storm’s ferocity had surprised them; a few said they wished they had left earlier.

Thayer Evans, Clifford Krauss and Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.

    A Million Flee as Huge Storm Begins to Hit Texas Coast, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/13ike.html?hp

FACTBOX:

Ike shuts 22 pct of U.S. refining capacity

Fri Sep 12, 2008 6:51pm EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Powerful Hurricane Ike bore down on the heart of the U.S. energy sector in Texas on Friday, leaving most U.S. Gulf of Mexico production idled and threatening a fifth of U.S. refining capacity with howling winds and a possible 20-foot wall of water.

Forecasters said the storm, packing winds of more than 100 mph, would likely hit near Houston early Saturday, after oil companies shut down about 25 percent of the nation's crude oil production and nearly 22 percent of its refined fuel production as a precaution.

The following outlines the impact of Ike on the energy sector:

***************************HIGHLIGHTS*************************

CUMULATIVE IMPACT OF GUSTAV AND IKE

*16.6 million barrels of crude oil

*81.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas

*20.9 million barrels of refining (counting only plants completely shut)

CURRENTLY SHUT/SLOWED

*97.5 pct Gulf of Mexico oil output

*94.4 pct Gulf of Mexico gas output

*14 refineries shut, 21.6 pct of US capacity

*3 refineries representing 5.1 pct of US capacity at reduced rates

*Most Gulf Coast pipelines, ports and waterways shut
 

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

*Louisiana oil port shut, but sends some oil from storage

*Ike shuts several crude, products pipelines

*Ike threat raises La power outages, adds some in Texas

*South Texas nuke in Ike's path to keep running

*Texas seeks EPA clean gasoline waiver to boost supply

*Henry Hub extends force majeure due Ike

*Hurricane Gustav did little damage offshore-MMS

*Ports closed from Corpus Christi to Lake Charles

*Power outages spread in Texas, W. La.

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

HEADLINES:

*97.5 percent of U.S. Gulf's 1.3 million barrels per day crude output shut

Wednesday, from 77.5 Tuesday, MMS says.

*94.4 pct of the Gulf's 7.4 billion cubic feet per day natural gas output

shut Wednesday, from 64.8 pct Tuesday

*****************************REFINING****************************

REFINERIES SHUT: (Texas, Ike-caused unless otherwise noted):

*Lyondell 270,600 bpd Houston refinery

*Exxon Mobil Baytown 567,000

*Shell-Pemex Deer Park 340,000

*Marathon Texas City 76,000

*ConocoPhillips 195,000 Alliance, Louisiana, due Gustav

*BP 467,700 Texas City

*ConocoPhillips 247,000 Sweeny

*Flint Hills 300,000 bpd Corpus Christi

*Valero 83,000 bpd Houston

*Valero 200,000 bpd Texas City

*Valero 325,000 bpd Port Arthur

*Motiva 285,000 bpd Port Arthur

*Exxon Mobil 349,000 bpd Beaumont

*Pasadena Refining 100,000 bpd
 

REFINERIES AT REDUCED RATES:

*Valero 195,000 bpd Memphis, Tennessee

*Citgo 430,000 bpd Lake Charles, Louisiana

*ConocoPhillips 280,000 bpd Lake Charles

BACKGROUND:

*At peak of Gustav's impact, more than a third of U.S. refining capacity

was either slowed or shut down.

********************ELECTRIC POWER IMPACT*************************

*Entergy shuts Sabine power plant due Ike

*Ike raises outages in Texas, W. La.

*South Texas nuke to keep running in Ike

*Conoco says preparing restart at Alliance refinery

*Entergy La. Waterford 3 reactor back at full power

*Entergy River Bend nuke still down for Gustav repairs

*********************PORTS, WATERWAYS****************************

HEADLINES:

*LOOP shut but sends limited oil from onshore storage

*USCG shuts Houston, Beaumont-PA, Lake Charles; pilots shut Corpus

*********************PIPELINES, GAS PLANTS************************

PIPELINES, FACILITIES SHUT:

*Shell Houston-to-Houma crude line

*Colonial distillates mainline Houston to New York Harbor

*Centennial Pipeline 210,000 bpd products pipeline from Beaumont, Texas,

to Creal Springs, Illinois

*Portions of ConocoPhillips pipeline system in Texas

*Dixie Pipeline 120,000 bpd propane pipeline from Mont Belvieu,

Texas to Iowa, Louisiana

*Enterprise Cameron Highway and Poseidon offshore crude

pipeline systems in Gulf of Mexico

*Explorer Pipeline 573,000 bpd pipeline from Gulf Coast to

Midwest

*Longhorn Pipeline products pipeline from Gulf Coast refineries

to West Texas and El Paso markets

*Portions of Marathon Pipeline system onshore Gulf Coast and

offshore Gulf of Mexico

*Portions of TEPPCO product line

*SPR Bryan Mound and Big Hill, Texas, West Hackberry, Louisiana, shut

*Seaway crude pipeline shut Wed, 6 p.m. CDT (2:00 p.m. EDT)

*Enbridge: Four pipelines in force majeure

*Part of BP Destin gas line to remain shut due Ike
 

HEADLINES:

*Shell: Capline at reduced rates

*Colonial Pipeline shuts Houston-to-New York distillate mainline and

gasoline mainline but some stub lines operating

*Henry Hub extends force majeure due Ike

*NYMEX keeps force maj. in place for August, September contracts

*Plantation pipeline at reduced rates
 

(Reporting by Bruce Nichols, Erwin Seba; Editing by Richard Valdmanis)

    FACTBOX: Ike shuts 22 pct of U.S. refining capacity, R, 12.9.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1137024220080912

Thousands in Texas Flee Hurricane Ike

September 11, 2008
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Thousands of people fled coastal areas of Texas on Wednesday as Hurricane Ike, having spun away from Cuba and roared into the Gulf of Mexico, moved toward the state with growing strength.

After pummeling Haiti, Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean, the storm refueled in the gulf and headed toward landfall somewhere from Corpus Christi northeastward to Galveston. It is expected to arrive early Saturday as a Category 4 hurricane, that is, one with maximum sustained winds of at least 131 miles per hour.

With memories of Hurricane Dolly in July still fresh, officials in Brazoria County, Galveston and other locations arranged for more than a thousand buses and began transporting residents to shelters and community centers farther inland. Some cities began evacuating medical patients with special needs, and school districts along the coast, including Corpus Christi’s, canceled classes through the rest of the week.

As the first evacuees arrived in San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth and elsewhere early Wednesday afternoon, President Bush declared an emergency in Texas and offered federal aid to state and local officials. Gov. Rick Perry issued a disaster declaration and activated 7,500 National Guard troops.

For the most part, the evacuations appeared to run smoothly. In Brazoria County, just south of Houston, officials issued mandatory-evacuation orders to as many as 20,000 people in Freeport and other coastal towns. A mandatory evacuation was also ordered, as of Thursday morning, for some 8,300 people in the western part of Galveston, an area of million-dollar beachfront homes that rest on stilts, and 1,700 people in neighboring Jamaica Beach.

Further, everyone in Galveston not affected by the mandatory-evacuation orders was nonetheless urged to leave.


In Pirates Beach, a Galveston subdivision lying within the area ordered evacuated, Rick Walton was clearing off the patio of his two-story home, just a block from the beach, and removing perishables from the refrigerator.

Contemplating the possible scope of the destruction that might lie ahead, Mr. Walton gazed at neighboring homes and said of the storm: “It could cut a canal through here. There wouldn’t even be land left.”

The hurricane’s center was about 675 miles east of Brownsville as of 11 p.m., Eastern time, on Wednesday. The storm was spiraling on a northwest path with wind speeds near 100 m.p.h., and, with the warm waters of the gulf as fuel, it is expected to develop Thursday into a far more severe storm, most likely a Category 4, forecasters said.

Concerns that the hurricane could damage offshore platforms and infrastructure prompted oil companies to evacuate workers from more than 400 of the 717 manned production platforms in the gulf, the federal Minerals Management Service said. But with large numbers of the platforms strengthened since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005, there was a sense that many production facilities might emerge unscathed.

Hurricane Dolly, a Category 2, was the last major storm to pound Texas. It delivered 16 inches of rain to the coast in July, knocked out power to 210,000 homes and businesses, and caused damage totaling at least $1.2 billion.

Hurricane Ike has already claimed about 80 lives in the Caribbean, most of them in Haiti, which had still been recovering from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Gustav in late August. After hitting Haiti, Ike slammed Cuba, where it moved so quickly that it killed four people before the Cuban government, which has a history of responding well to the threat of powerful storms, could evacuate most of those in its path.
 

Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Galveston.

    Thousands in Texas Flee Hurricane Ike, NYT, 11.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/us/11Ike.html?hp

Storm Long Past,

Darkness and Heat

Still Cling to Baton Rouge

September 9, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

BATON ROUGE, La. — The fearsome heat of a South Louisiana summer, unmediated by air-conditioning, reduces the strong to a primal struggle and sends the weak to the hospital.

Thousands here are enduring it this way seven days after Hurricane Gustav. Nearly 40 percent of the city’s electrical power remains out, and the principal utility, Entergy, says it will be the last week of September before everyone’s electricity here in the state capital is restored.

Whole neighborhoods are sweating it out, discovering things about the natural setting, themselves and their neighbors they did not know and in some cases did not particularly want to know. Front doors are open, generators are humming, downed tree limbs are piled high, and the people are dripping.

Power blackouts have been widespread in South Louisiana in the last week. More than 200,000 of Entergy’s customers in Louisiana were still without power Monday, down from nearly 829,000 immediately after the storm.

“It’s sort of paralyzed the economy of the state,” said Foster Campbell, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Politicians are fuming, literally and figuratively. Several are vowing investigations and promising a closer look at warding off the failures that are, in Louisiana, as common as the violent summer storm.

This one, however, is a marathon. And it is particularly hard to swallow now that New Orleans, the resented city downriver, has had its power restored, and just downright unpleasant when the thermometer reads 95 and the humidity is right there with it.

“I’m not coping; I’m just existing,” said Marilyn O’Brien, standing outside her son’s house in Capital Heights, a pleasant district of 1920s houses under towering trees, many of them now fractured by the storm. Ms. O’Brien looked haggard. The yard was covered in downed power lines and chunks of tree trunk her son had diligently sawed. He has no power, and neither does she.

“I don’t know how the Iraqis have done it,” she said. “Your energy’s zapped, and you’re wet. My clothes feel like another layer of skin. And I’ve not slept in a week.”

Down the street, the power failure sent 73-year-old Verien Flaherty to the hospital with heat exhaustion and dehydration by the second day. Her little house, she said stoically, had become “quite hot and smelly.” By Monday, though, her son had procured a generator, and she was sitting in the darkened living room.

Nearby were fleets of Entergy trucks, not working fast enough for most of the people here. Entergy says the hurricane roared right up the path of its major transmission lines, knocking out all 14 of them between here and New Orleans. Some 8,000 poles went down too, all carrying above-ground wires. Giant steel towers holding the lines were pushed to the ground like a child’s Erector set.

Alex Schott, a spokesman for Entergy, said the company was “restoring power at record speeds.” The company’s lines suffered “a lot of damage,” Mr. Schott said, and Baton Rouge was “where the brunt of it occurred.”

Even longtime critics of Entergy, a profit-making regional energy company that is a monopoly or near-monopoly in many places and whose stock has steadily risen over the last eight years, say burying the power lines may not be practical in a place like South Louisiana, where water is rarely far from the surface.

But there could be other ways of protecting the power system from the strong storms that regularly batter this coastal state. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said Monday that she was working on legislation to give the government a role in strengthening the transmission lines here, “so that when disaster strikes, our communities will not be faced with needless and endless power outages.”

Mr. Schott said Entergy might be interested in such strategies, “as long as costs are recoverable” — in all likelihood, paid by the customers.

An aide to Ms. Landrieu spoke of encasing the lines in reinforced pipe, as is done in Europe.

Mr. Campbell, the public service commissioner, said it was “totally unacceptable for people to be out two, three weeks without electricity.” He made note of what has become a particular irritant in light of the failures, the sky-high power bills that are a feature of life here.

“There’s a great irony here: we have some of the poorest people in the country, and some of the highest utility rates in the Southeastern U.S.” said Mr. Campbell, who added that he was “not interested in giving Entergy any money for this storm.”

In Capital Heights, the accent was on stoicism. “Our house is sweaty hot,” said Kelly Nelson, a hospital physical therapist. “You go to sleep at 9 o’clock, you wake up at 11 at night, hoping it’s time to go to work.”

Across the street, Keith Morris, an artist, was wet but smiling. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m 58 years old. I’ve lived in Louisiana and in Siberia, and it’s a hell of a lot easier here than in Siberia.”

For others, the unwonted exposure to that basic element of Louisiana life made them rethink a commitment that often demands so much. “I’ve lost my attachment to something that hurts me,” Ms. O’Brien said.

“It has beaten me up, so I feel like divorcing it,” she said. “I would leave Louisiana.”

Jeremy Alford contributed reporting.

    Storm Long Past, Darkness and Heat Still Cling to Baton Rouge, NYT, 9.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/us/09power.html

Tropical Storm Hanna Soaks East Coast

September 7, 2008
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — With a fearsome Hurricane Ike not far in its wake, Tropical Storm Hanna cruised ashore here early Saturday, bringing soaking rains and near-hurricane force winds to the Carolina coast but doing little immediate damage before pivoting quickly up the Eastern Seaboard.

Officials in South Carolina and North Carolina said they had received no reports of deaths or injuries by midday Saturday. Both states experienced isolated flooding, downed trees and beach erosion. Some 53,000 customers suffered power failures in North Carolina, many of them in inland areas where rain was heaviest, and 1,300 lost electricity in South Carolina. About 2,000 people spent the night in shelters in the two states.

“It’s been an awning here, a satellite dish there,” said Kelly L. Brosky, a spokeswoman for Horry County, which includes North Myrtle Beach. “Given that inland areas got five to six inches of rain, the flooding really hasn’t been anything major.”

The storm reached the Washington area by midday, producing torrential rains. In Virginia, about 55,000 people were left without power as power lines went down with felled trees. Flash floods and accidents caused the authorities to close more than 100 roads, and about 100 people were in shelters.

In Washington, about 500 homes and businesses were left without power, but no flash floods were reported.

Though not debilitating, the storm extended a two-week assault by tropical weather systems on the coastal South that began with Tropical Storm Fay’s soggy trek through Florida and continued with Hurricane Gustav’s landfall in Louisiana. The region had seen a relative respite since 2005, the year of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Next comes Hurricane Ike, which by early Saturday evening had grown into a Category 4 storm that the National Hurricane Center described as “extremely dangerous.” It is expected to move gradually through the Atlantic toward South Florida and possibly into the Gulf of Mexico. A mandatory evacuation of the Florida Keys began Saturday morning, when tourists were ordered to leave. Residents were to follow Sunday.

The path of Hurricane Ike shifted south and west Saturday, taking aim at Cuba and the Florida Keys, but raising hopes that the storm would not directly hit Miami. And with visitors and residents of the Keys ordered to leave before the storm arrives, possibly as early as Monday night, state officials continued to make plans for a possible evacuation of other coastal areas in case the storm shifted course.

At a Saturday morning news conference, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida urged residents to listen for possible evacuation orders and to switch to the weather during commercials on weekend football broadcasts. The state has plans to turn highways into one-way evacuation routes, Mr. Crist said, and is loading trucks with water and ready-to-eat meals.

Tropical Storm Hanna, which caused more than 100 deaths as it passed through Haiti, made landfall at 3:20 a.m. along the North Carolina-South Carolina border. The hurricane center measured its sustained winds at 70 miles per hour, short of the 74 m.p.h. needed to qualify as a hurricane.

After sunrise Saturday, winds had dropped to 50 m.p.h. Tropical storm warnings and watches stretched from North Carolina to Massachusetts, and the storm promised to dampen the weekend on much of the seaboard.

The National Weather Service issued a tropical storm warning for Manhattan. Late Saturday, the center of the storm was just off Long Island. Flood watches were in effect for nearly the entire region through Sunday morning, as forecasters expected up to 12 hours of sustained rainfall.

While Manhattan cross-streets can become wind tunnels amid stormy conditions, the skyscrapers of Midtown have usually acted as a buffer against the most extreme gusts. But some of the city’s most prominent businesses were not taking any chances. A group of Times Square businesses sent a notice to its members on Friday warning that building managers should take down any exterior items that could be blown off by wind and pose a hazard to pedestrians.

Tropical Storm Hanna moved quickly, at 20 m.p.h., not lingering long enough to drop the kind of rain typically required for heavy flooding. North Carolina officials expected up to eight inches in some areas before the storm passed into Virginia, but said flooding had been minor. Much of the region has been suffering from drought, making the three to six inches that fell in some areas welcome.

Officials in the Carolinas had encouraged evacuations of low-lying coastal areas, but most residents and business owners regarded the storm casually.

Bars and restaurants remained open in the tourist strand south of here, though hotels reported heavy cancellations. Most homeowners in the beach towns to the north did not bother to board their windows.

Lane E. Larsen, 62, a retiree who lives in nearby Little River, said he and his family awoke about 3 a.m. and decided to watch the storm from the comfort of their back-deck hot tub. “We were having a good old time,” Mr. Larsen said. “I was thinking about boarding up, but it’s a lot of work and I tend to be lazy.”
 

Damien Cave contributed reporting from Miami, Michael M. Grynbaum from New York and Ian Urbina from Washington.

    Tropical Storm Hanna Soaks East Coast, NYT, 7.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/us/07storm.html?hp

Assessing the Value of Small Wind Turbines

September 4, 2008
The New York Times
By KATE GALBRAITH

SAN FRANCISCO — With the California blackouts of 2001 still a painful memory, Chris Beaudoin wants to generate some of his own electricity. He marveled the other day at how close he is to that goal, gazing at two new wind turbines atop his garage roof. They will soon be hooked to the power grid.

“I don’t care about how much it costs,” said Mr. Beaudoin, a flight attendant with United Airlines. That would be $5,000 a turbine, an expense Mr. Beaudoin is unlikely to recoup in electricity savings anytime soon.

No matter. After shoring up the roof and installing the two 300-pound, steel-poled turbines in January, Mr. Beaudoin found himself at the leading edge of a trend in renewable energy.

Fascination with wind turbines small enough to mount on a roof is spreading from coast to coast. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York last month proposed dotting the city with them. Small turbines have already appeared at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, atop an office building at Logan International Airport in Boston, and even on a utility pole in the small New Hampshire town of Hampton.

These tiny turbines generate so little electricity that some energy experts are not sure the economics will ever make sense.

By contrast, the turbines being installed at wind farms are getting ever larger and more powerful, lowering the unit cost of electricity to the point that they are becoming competitive with electricity generated from natural gas.

The spread of the big turbines and a general fascination with all things green are helping to spur interest in rooftop microturbines, creating a movement somewhere on the border between a hobby and an environmental fashion statement.

Some people have long stuck relatively modest turbines on towers in the countryside. Those are capable of generating enough electricity on a windy day to provide a fair portion of a home’s needs and can eventually pay for themselves. The new rooftop turbines are much smaller, however, and few statistics are available yet on their performance.

Mr. Beaudoin hopes to get 30 percent of his electricity from the turbines on a windy day, but whether that will happen remains to be seen.

Jay Leno, the host of “The Tonight Show,” recently installed a prototype wind turbine (as well as solar panels) atop a garage in Burbank, Calif., where he works on his car collection. He senses public interest in small-scale wind power that does not have much to do with dollars-and-cents analysis.

“People seem fascinated by the turbines,” Mr. Leno said. “You go, ‘Look! It’s spinning!’ ”

Perched high above a building, wind turbines serve as a far more visible clean-energy credential than solar panels, which are often hard to see. At least a dozen small manufacturers have sprouted up to supply the market, though rooftop turbines still account for only 1 percent or so of the 10,000 small wind turbines that are sold each year in the country, according to Ron Stimmel, an advocate of small wind systems at the American Wind Energy Association.

That number seems poised to grow, given the recent interest.

“We’re prebleeding-edge early,” said Todd Pelman, founder of Blue Green Pacific, the maker of Mr. Beaudoin’s turbine. The technology, he conceded, is not yet “something that would be bought at Home Depot.”

Mr. Pelman has sunk $200,000 of his own money into the start-up, which has just three turbines in operation — Mr. Beaudoin’s pair, and one above Mr. Pelman’s own bedroom in a Victorian house in San Francisco.

In accordance with urban sensibilities, many of the new designs are stylish. The six turbines peeping over the edge of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, installed this summer, look as if they are covered with dainty white parasols, a design touch that doubles as a bird shield. The French designer Philippe Starck has plans to introduce an elegant plastic turbine in Europe this fall.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal calls for wind turbines on the city’s skyscrapers and bridges, though it is unclear how big they will be and just where they will go.

“It’s the Wild West out there in small wind these days,” said David Rabkin, director of innovation, strategic partnerships and sustainability at the Museum of Science in Boston. Aided by a $300,000 state grant, the museum plans to put a total of nine turbines, of five types, on its roof by next April as an educational project.

Harvard also plans to put some atop its Holyoke Center office complex and on a parking garage. Harvard views the experimental installations as “outward symbols of our commitment to renewable energy and sustainability here on campus,” said Jim Gray, associate vice president for Harvard real estate services.

In San Francisco, another coastal city with abundant wind, the local government is considering introducing incentives to increase urban wind power.

“You’re seeing the birth of a movement,” said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco Department of Environment, who hopes to put a turbine on his own home. “Ten years from now, you could probably see 2,000 to 3,000 rooftops with wind.”

But many experts caution that rooftops, while abundant, are usually poor places to harness the breeze. Not only are cities less windy than the countryside, but the air is choppier because of trees and the variation in heights in buildings. Turbulence can wear down a turbine and make it operate less efficiently. This is particularly problematic for houses with pitched roofs.

“In an urban environment, more times than not you’re better off with a solar panel,” said Mr. Stimmel, of the wind industry association.

A recent British study of wind on home roofs found that turbines generate less power than installers projected because of lower-than-expected wind speeds. Ian Woofenden, a senior editor at Home Power magazine who teaches wind workshops, estimates that electricity from rooftop turbines may cost $1.50 a kilowatt hour or more. (That is enough electricity to run a hair dryer for an hour, roughly.)

By comparison, he said, power from a well-sited, tower-mounted turbine would cost 10 to 50 cents a kilowatt hour, and power from utility-scale wind farms costs less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour.

“Rooftop wind economics are abysmal, since the resource just isn’t there,” he said in an e-mail message.

Rooftop wind advocates argue that output will turn out to be healthy in windy areas, and they also think that prices for small turbines will come down as the market grows, altering the economics.

The most established company selling rooftop turbines is AeroVironment, a California company better known for making unmanned aerial vehicles. It has installed demonstration projects on about a dozen commercial rooftops, including those at Logan airport and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

According to Paul Glenney, director of the company’s clean energy technology center, the edge of a long, flat roof (above, say, a big-box store or warehouse) can experience up to 40 percent extra wind, much like the stiff breeze at the edge of a cliff.

Demand for AeroVironment’s rooftop turbines, which it sells for about $6,500 each, is strong, he said. “We’ve hidden our Web site very carefully, and yet people find us,” Mr. Glenney said.

AeroVironment officials say that rooftop turbines at windy sites in states with costly electricity could pay for themselves in four to eight years, but acknowledge that in places with low power prices, the turbines may never recoup their costs.

In May and June, the 20 Logan turbines combined produced just 1,430 kilowatt hours — less than the average home would use over that time. Airport authorities said, however, that the Boston winds pick up in the fall and winter. Mr. Leno thinks his turbine has generated about 725 kilowatt hours in six months of operation.

“You can say, ‘That’s not a lot,’ or ‘Every bit helps,’ ” Mr. Leno said.

British studies have recently suggested that making and transporting turbines for cities may lead to more carbon dioxide emissions than the turbines save.

A special challenge of urban turbine manufacturers is to make machines with minimal noise and vibration. At Logan, the only complaint has come from a person with an office right under a turbine.

“Basically he said it just sounds like he’s in a Stephen King movie — that howling when there’s a lot of wind,” said Sam Sleiman, director of capital programs at Massport, the agency overseeing the airport project.

But the more common reaction to these small turbines is envy. Reino Niemela, a San Franciscan, has a direct view of Mr. Beaudoin’s turbines from his backyard.

“I was thinking of doing something like that myself,” he said.

    Assessing the Value of Small Wind Turbines, NYT, 4.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/business/04wind.html

Strongest Storms

Grow Stronger Yet,

Study Says

September 4, 2008
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive.

“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Dr. Elsner said.

With oceans expected to continue warming, “one would expect more 4s and 5s,” he said of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes, those with maximum sustained winds of at least 131 miles per hour.

About 90 tropical cyclone storms form each year around the world. In the Atlantic, the stronger ones, with winds of at least 74 m.p.h., are hurricanes; the equivalents in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are typhoons. Ten named storms have formed in the Atlantic this hurricane season, which continues to the end of November.

Heat from the warming oceans will provide more energy to spin up hurricanes and typhoons, but the changing climate could also heighten conditions like wind shear — winds blowing at different speeds and different directions at different altitudes — that tend to tear a storm apart.

Because of these environmental factors, most storms fall far short of their maximum possible intensity. But Dr. Elsner, along with Thomas H. Jagger, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State, and James P. Kossin, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reasoned that warmer waters increased the possible intensity and that storms that develop in ideal conditions might have become stronger.

Having examined satellite data from 1981 through 2006, a period in which sea surface temperature rose to 83.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 82.8 degrees, they concluded that the highest wind speeds of the strongest storms averaged 156 m.p.h. in 2006, up from 140 m.p.h. hour in 1981. The increases in cyclone intensity were greatest in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Because the data came from one set of satellites, the scientists avoided some of the calibration difficulties that had troubled earlier studies.

“This study offers definitive evidence that there are more of the very strongest hurricanes around the world, even though the total number of storms globally shows hardly any trend,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who suggested in 2005 that global warming had already intensified cyclones.

Christopher W. Landsea, science and operations manager at the National Hurricane Center, who has been skeptical of the connection, said the statistical methodology in the new study was excellent. But Dr. Landsea questioned the underlying data, particularly corrections for data taken from the Indian Ocean before 1997, when there were fewer satellites observing the storms.

He also said that the conclusions might have been skewed because the starting point of the data, 1981, coincided with a relatively quiet period of Atlantic hurricane activity, whereas the ending point, 2006, coincided with an active period that began around 1995.

“The paper has some elegantly calculated statistics, but these are generated on data that are not, in my opinion, reliable for examining how the strongest tropical cyclones have changed around the world,” Dr. Landsea said.

Thomas R. Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton said the data involved too short a period to draw long-term conclusions.

“One is left with a very suggestive result and a very interesting result,” Dr. Knutson said, “but it’s not a definitive smoking gun for a greenhouse warming signal on hurricanes.”

    Strongest Storms Grow Stronger Yet, Study Says, NYT, 4.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/science/04cyclone.html

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?hp

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?hp

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

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?hp

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