U.S. Gulf Coast residents evacuated their homes en masse Sunday as Hurricane Gustav bore down, threatening to cut a devastating swath across the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas infrastructure and to flood at least parts of New Orleans just days after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Gustav's untimely arrival also disrupted plans for the Republican National Convention, which was scheduled to begin Monday in Minnesota. Sen. John McCain canceled the first day of his convention, and his campaign made plans to turn the gathering into a giant fundraiser as they braced for the natural and political fallout. (See related article.)

Campaign and convention officials said no decisions have been made about what will happen beyond Monday night, saying decisions would be made day by day.

Chastened after a disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials scrambled to assure the public that they were prepared. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff headed to the region Sunday and said he planned to stay through the storm.

Forecasters now expect Gustav to slam into the central Louisiana coast Monday morning, not far from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port. If Gustav stays on that course, it would disrupt world oil shipping lanes. The port handles 10% of U.S. oil imports and is the only U.S. facility capable of offloading the largest tankers.

The monstrous storm, which forecasters said was 900 miles wide, weakened to a Category 3 hurricane, packing winds of 115 miles per hour. Forecasters said it could strengthen again, however, before making landfall.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned state residents that coastal Louisiana, including low-lying New Orleans, could be under as much as 12 feet of water when Hurricane Gustav rumbles ashore on Monday, thanks in part to still inadequate levee systems. (See article.)

That would mean, he said, "overtopping of levees" across much of southern Louisiana, leaving areas like Plaquemines, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes inundated by the Gulf of Mexico.

Making the situation worse, he said, is that the Army Corps of Engineers "is not nearly done with levee work that was supposed to have been done. Tremendous areas are not protected. We are still years away before they have 100-year flood protection done for New Orleans. The levees are not up to authorized heights."

"No one should assume these levees are back to where they need to be," Mr. Jindal said. At this point, he said, "they'll protect property, but not protect life."

With memories of Katrina fresh in their minds, Louisiana residents largely heeded the calls to evacuate. Mr. Jindal said about 1.9 million people evacuated from South Louisiana, about 95% of that area's population. About 10,000 people remain in New Orleans, he estimated. Mr. Jindal said there had been unconfirmed reports of three deaths related to evacuating critical-care patients. Two were in Lake Charles, La., and one was in New Orleans, he said. One had a do-not-resuscitate order, he said.

Officials are particularly worried that Gustav's storm surge could overwhelm the Harvey canal in New Orleans' West Bank area. Its earthen levees are as low as eight feet in some areas. Arthur Lawson, chief of police of the Jefferson Parish town of Gretna, said some sections of the parish could get flooding higher than 15 feet.

For decades, the businesses that lined the banks of the canal fought against raising the levees because it would make it too difficult to load and unload the boats and barges. After Katrina, the Corps began a massive project to build 14 foot floodwalls along the canal, but only a half-mile to a mile has been completed and the full project won't be completed for several more years, according to Chris Roberts, a Jefferson Parish councilman.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said another weak point is the Industrial Canal. As it did three years ago, the canal could overtop, flooding the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward and other poor and working-class neighborhoods that suffered the brunt of Katrina, he said.

There is concern as well about levees in the low-lying coastal regions of the state. Windell Curole, director of the South Lafourche Levee District and interim manager of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District southwest of New Orleans, said, "The parish hurricane protection levees in South Lafourche are not capable of withstanding the storm surge associated with a Category 3 Hurricane Gustav."

"The lower Lafourche levees have never faced the kind of storm surge expected to be brought by Hurricane Gustav," Mr. Curole said.

Mr. Nagin imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew and threatened that looters would be sent directly to the state's most notorious prison. Mr. Nagin said the city had evacuated more than 14,000 people – mostly the elderly, disabled and the poor with no other means of transportation – and that they were being sent by bus to stay at shelters in several Texas cities and in Memphis, Tenn.

While many people waited for hours for busses to show up, still the evacuations appeared to go much more smoothly than in past years. Thousands of other residents have left on their own. The government turned major highways into one-way routes out of the city beginning at 4 a.m. Sunday; the mayor said it was going relatively smoothly, if slowly, especially for eastbound traffic on I-10.

R. David Paulison, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Sunday that emergency personnel were still evacuating nursing home and hospital patients from several facilities in New Orleans.

"A couple of hospitals that had planned not to evacuate decided they should," he said. In addition "several nursing homes" that were supposed to have plans in place for evacuating residents did not. That left authorities with "several hundred extra patients we weren't anticipating and a lot were critical care."

Mr. Paulison said helicopters were brought in, along with five C-130 aircraft to get the patients out of the city.

Mr. Paulison said Sunday afternoon that there were still residents who had not evacuated but the population was "dwindling quickly." He said airplanes were still flying and trains and buses were still operating.

Mr. Nagin raised concern about the boxy white travel trailers that still dot the city – some of them brought in by the federal government three years ago as temporary housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

A government sweep of the trailers showed that most had been vacated. Even so, they remain a menace, Mr. Nagin said. When Gustav roars ashore, he said, "some of them will become projectiles and start to fly around the city." There are about 2,500 trailers in the city and 6,000 in surrounding areas, he said.

Some people continued to resist leaving New Orleans, especially in Uptown New Orleans, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, Mr. Nagin said. He made a public pledge to those who left, saying: "We will try to get you back in the city as soon as it is safe, whether you went out on a bus, a train, a plane or drove yourself out." The city council is moving to Baton Rouge, though Mr. Nagin plans to stay in place.

Mr. Nagin said that police and National Guard forces are much stronger than they were in the city after Katrina, and suggested that looters would be sent to the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, once known as the bloodiest prison in the South due to the high number of inmate assaults.

Away from the spotlight focused on New Orleans, residents of central Louisiana were also preparing for Gustav's arrival.

Hours before the massive storm was predicted to make landfall, Morgan City, La., projected to be near the center of the storm's path, was eerily quiet. As the first raindrops begin to fall, Roddy Prestenbatch screwed the final boards over the glass of a gas station here. A crew from a local television station filmed him, eager for any shots of people still in the city. On the nearby highway, a string of ambulances sped toward Morgan City to get into position for the storm. They had the road to themselves.

Memories of Rita Remain

Near Lake Charles, La. people also fled. This area was battered three years ago by Hurricane Rita, an experience that left many in the area unwilling to risk staying behind.

"Those who stayed during Rita saw the same sort of situation... These people learned that lesson that once you're in it, you're in it and there's nothing we can do for you," said Jason Barnes of the Calcasieu Parish office of homeland security and emergency preparedness.

Many residents didn't wait for a mandatory evacuation order. Mr. Barnes estimated that half the parish's 195,000 residents had already left by midday Sunday.

Others were trying. At a gas station by the highway, Charles Collins, 59, was making a sign on a piece of cardboard in an effort to hitch a ride to Houston. His beat-up old truck wasn't up to the drive, he said.

"I went through one hurricane and I'm not ready to go through another," said Mr. Collins, whose house lost its roof in Rita. "We haven't recovered from the last one."

Some houses in Lake Charles that lost their roofs in Rita still bear the blue tarps handed out by FEMA, but the city has largely rebuilt from the storm. That isn't true down along the coast, where mangled buildings sit next to trailer homes and refrigerators, televisions and even entire homes picked up by the last storm still lie in the marsh land beside the road. By Sunday morning, the coastal area was nearly empty, with just a few stragglers lining up at gas stations and ranchers rounding up their cattle.

On I-10 in Lake Charles, La., evacuees from New Orleans on their way to Houston said the drive out had gone far more smoothly this time than in Katrina. This time, they said, people didn't wait until the last minute to leave.

"Everybody's getting out," said Bertha Ellis, 62, as she refueled her car at a Shell station here. Beside her, the highway was wide open, with a thin stream of cars whizzing by at 70 miles an hour.

Dwayne Mansfield, 43, a newspaper delivery truck driver, said it took him about four hours to get to Lake Charles -- longer than usual, but hardly the 20-hour New Orleans-Houston slog in 2005.

A mandatory evacuation was also underway Sunday morning in eastern Texas, next to the coastal Louisiana border. The evacuation applied to the Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan region, an area of about 376,000 people known as the Golden Triangle, including Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties, said a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.



Source: The Wall Street Journal.

__________________
Regards,
P.R.