NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Gustav smashed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast on Monday, unleashing torrential rains and 110-mph winds that sent waves of water splashing over this city’s levees. But early indications were that the weakened storm caused far less damage than originally feared, and New Orleans appeared to have avoided a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina three years ago.
As the storm made its way inland, federal, state and local officials expressed confidence that the levees protecting New Orleans would hold, sparing the city from catastrophic flooding. U.S. Coast Guard helicopter overflights Monday confirmed that there were no levee breaches so far, according to Marty Bahamonde, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Still, officials’ hopes were tempered by persistent concerns about pressure on the levees and floodwall system from a storm surge that Gustav pushed up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico, and by vivid recollections that the Katrina disaster developed gradually after initial reports indicated that the city had dodged a bullet.
The optimism Monday prompted New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to suggest that evacuees could be allowed to start returning to the city as early as today. But Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal quickly cautioned that it “too early to be telling people today that they can come back tomorrow.”
Late Monday, Nagin backpedaled, announcing a tentative schedule that would allow New Orleaneans to return in phases, and encouraging employees of major companies and retailers to return first, probably on Wednesday. The rest of the city’s residents will be allowed back starting possibly Thursday, he said.
Gustav’s center passed west of the city, sparing New Orleans the force of the hurricane’s strongest winds. Instead, a largely rural area of Louisiana — a center of the state’s oil and fishing industries — bore the brunt of the storm when it struck the coast as a Category 2 hurricane Monday morning at Cocodrie, a fishing village about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans.
About four hours into the storm’s progress across southwestern Louisiana, the National Hurricane Center downgraded Gustav to a Category 1 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph.
Despite its diminished state, the storm still posed a risk to the area’s taxed levee system. National Hurricane Center meteorologist Jessica Shaver Clark said the storm surge reached 12 feet and was expected to climb as high as 14 feet later Monday. Rainfall between six and 12 inches was reported, with some areas receiving as much as 20 inches.
The hurricane reportedly spawned several tornadoes north of New Orleans and in southern Mississippi, and there were tornado warnings in southern Alabama and the western Florida Panhandle. Tropical-storm-force winds extended up to 200 miles from Gustav’s center, Clark said.
“The worst flooding could be on the backside of this storm,” Jindal warned in Baton Rouge. He said he asked the federal government to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help with fuel supplies that were disrupted by the storm.
Seven people were killed in storm-related traffic accidents, four of them in Georgia when their car struck a tree, the Associated Press reported. In addition, three critically ill hospital patients died while being evacuated. Before striking the Gulf Coast, Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
President Bush dropped plans to address the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday night and flew instead to Texas, where he visited an emergency operations center in Austin. He said he wanted 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” from the hurricane. “And to that end, I feel good about this event.”
“The coordination on this storm is a lot better than during Katrina,” Bush said. Later in the day, he traveled to the Alamo Regional Command Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where he met with relief workers and urged Americans to offer help.
As Gustav made its way across the Gulf of Mexico toward its rendezvous with Louisiana, it reached Category 4 status at one point and raised fears that it could become a Category 5, the most dangerous level of hurricane, with the strongest winds. Officials said those fears accounted for much of the success in motivating most New Orleans residents — and about 2 million Gulf Coast residents in all — to evacuate their homes and head inland.
“We really saw a surge in the evacuation when they said it was going to be a Category 5,” said Col. Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police. “It really scared people and pushed them out.”
Energy companies evacuated stationary production platforms and movable drilling rigs as the storm approached, shutting down nearly all U.S. oil and gas production in the gulf and more than a quarter of domestic refinery capacity onshore. Federal energy officials estimated that the shutdowns accounted for about a quarter of total U.S. oil production, 12 percent of natural gas production and 12 percent of oil-refining capacity. About 12 of 33 Gulf Coast refineries were closed, and 10 others operated at reduced levels.
But Kevin Kolevar, assistant secretary of energy, said production can resume quickly, assuming there is no significant damage to platforms or undersea pipelines. “We don’t see any indication of (significant damage) at this time, but we’ll learn more tomorrow as companies start repopulating facilities,” he said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
