| | |  Americas & Beyond | September 2008 
Spared a Direct Hit, New Orleans Exhales
 Adam Nossiter, Damien Cave, Kareem Fahim & James Barron - New York Times
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| | Winds pushing waves over the levee into the Ninth Ward of New Orleans on Monday as Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast. (Richard Perry/The New York Times) | | |
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 depression early Tuesday as it moved over central Louisiana, though officials said that it remained a flood threat. Early Tuesday, it was 135 miles northwest of Lafayette, La., and moving toward the northwest. It was forecast to move into northeast Texas late Tuesday.
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."
Reporting was contributed by Shaila Dewan from New Orleans; Eric Lipton and Steven Lee Myers from Washington; Thayer Evans from Lafayette, La.; Staci Semrad from San Antonio; James C. McKinley Jr. from Lake Charles, La.; and James Barron, Anahad O’Connor and Wil Moss from New York. |
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