Hurricane Gustav slammed into the heart of Louisiana’s fishing and oil industry with 110-mph winds Monday, delivering only a glancing blow to New Orleans that raised hopes the city would escape the kind of catastrophic flooding brought by Katrina.
That did not mean the state survived the storm without damage. A levee in the southeastern part of the state was on the verge of collapse, and officials scrambled to fortify it. Roofs were torn from homes, trees toppled and roads flooded. More than a million customers were without power.
The nearly 2 million people who left coastal Louisiana on a mandatory evacuation order watched TV coverage from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away, many of them wondering what kind of damage they would find when they were allowed to return home.
Keith Cologne of Chauvin, La., looked dejected after talking by telephone to a friend who didn’t evacuate.
“They said it’s bad, real bad. There are roofs lying all over. It’s all gone,” said Cologne, staying at a hotel in Orange Beach, Ala.
But the biggest fear — that the levees surrounding the saucer- shaped city of New Orleans would break and flood all over again — hadn’t been realized. Wind-driven water sloshed over the top of the Industrial Canal’s floodwall, but city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers said they expected that the levees, still only partly rebuilt after Katrina, would hold.
Flood protections along the canal broke with disastrous effect three years ago during Katrina, submerging St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward.
“We are seeing some overtopping waves,” said Col. Jeff Bedey, commander of the Corps’ hurricane protection office. “We are cautiously optimistic and confident that we won’t see catastrophic wall failure.”
“Worry about the water”
In the Upper Ninth Ward, about half the streets closest to the canal were flooded with ankle- to knee- deep water. Of more immediate concern to authorities were two small vessels that broke loose from their moorings in the canal and were resting against the Florida Street wharf.
The rain had stopped by midafternoon Monday in the French Quarter, the highest point in the city. The wind was breezy but not fierce, and some of the approximately 10,000 people who chose to defy warnings and stay behind began to emerge. But knowing that the levees surrounding the city could still be pressured by rising waters, no one was celebrating just yet.
“I don’t think we’re out of the woods. We still have to worry about the water,” said Gerald Boulmay, 61, a St. Louis Hotel worker and lifelong New Orleans resident.
One community in southeastern Louisiana was fearful its levee wouldn’t hold. As many as 300 homes in Plaquemines Parish were threatened, and the parish president called a television station to issue an urgent plea to any residents who were left to flee to the Mississippi River, where officials would evacuate them.
“It’s overtopping. There’s a possibility it’s going to be compromised,” said Phil Truxillo, a Plaquemines emergency official.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit about 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie, a low-lying community in Louisiana’s Cajun country 72 miles southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm on a scale of 1 to 5. The storm weakened to a Category 1 later in the afternoon. Forecasters had feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.
As of noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.
The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half-century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors — oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams — has destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.
For all their apparent similarities, Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina were different in one critical respect: Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, a far higher wall of water than Gustav hauled ashore.
Katrina was a bigger storm when it came ashore in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm, and it made a direct hit on the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Gustav skirted along Louisiana’s shoreline at “a more gentle angle,” said National Weather Service storm-surge specialist Will Shaffer.
Seven deaths reported
Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s emergency-preparedness director, Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, said residents might be allowed to return 24 hours after the tropical-storm-force winds die down.
Other evacuated areas along the coast may be away from home longer, said National Hurricane Center director Bill Read. The hurricane will likely slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly Arkansas, and those areas could then get 20 inches of rain.
Authorities reported seven deaths related to the storm, including four people fleeing the storm who were killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree. A couple in their 70s died when a tree struck their relatives’ home in Baton Rouge. Another woman died in an auto accident between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
