A weaker-than-expected Gustav swirled into the fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns of Louisiana’s Cajun country Monday, delivering only a glancing blow to New Orleans that did little more than send water sloshing harmlessly over rebuilt floodwalls.
It was the first test of New Orleans’ new and improved levees, which are still being rebuilt three years after Hurricane Katrina.
And it was a powerful demonstration of how federal, state and local officials learned some of the painful lessons of the catastrophic 2005 storm that killed more than 1,600 people.
The storm that crashed ashore as a Category 1 hurricane had by late Monday been downgraded to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph.
“They made a much bigger deal out of it, bigger than it needed to be,” 31-year-old security worker Gabriel Knight said in New Orleans’ nearly empty French Quarter. “I was here with Katrina. That was a nightmare. This was nothing.”
There was growing optimism that New Orleans would soon reopen for business. Mayor C. Ray Nagin cautioned that today would be too early for residents to return to a city largely in the dark but said their homecoming was “only days away, not weeks.”
“I was hoping that this would happen, that we would be able to stand before America, before everyone, and say that we had some success with the levee system,” Nagin said. “I feel really good about it.”
A mandatory evacuation order and curfew remained in effect, and nearly 80,000 remained without power after the storm damaged transmission lines that snapped in the wind and knocked 35 substations out of service.
The city’s sewer system is damaged, and hospitals were working with skeleton crews on backup power. Drinking water continued to flow in the city, and the pumps that keep it dry never shut down — two critical service failings that contributed to Katrina’s toll.
1 million homes lost power
Crews will comb the city today to fully review the damage, Nagin said, with the goal of having residents return later in the week.
“I would not do a thing differently,” Nagin said. “I’d probably call Gustav, instead of the mother of all storms, maybe the mother-in-law or the ugly sister of all storms.”
The sense of relief did not mean the state came through the storm unscathed. A levee in southeastern Louisiana was in danger of collapse, and officials scrambled to fortify it. Roofs were torn from homes, trees toppled and roads flooded. A ferry sank. More than 1 million homes were without power.
But the biggest fear — that the levees surrounding the saucer- shaped city of New Orleans would break — hadn’t been realized.
Wind-driven water sloshed over the top of the Industrial Canal’s floodwall — the same structure that broke with disastrous consequences during Katrina — and several Ninth Ward streets close by were flooded with ankle- to knee-deep water. Still, city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers expressed confidence the levees were holding.
Gustav blew ashore about 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie, 72 miles southwest of New Orleans.
Forecasters had feared a catastrophic Category 4 storm on the 1-to-5 scale, but Gustav weakened as it drew close to land, coming ashore with 110-mph winds. It quickly dropped to a Category 1 as it steamed inland toward Texas.
Late Monday, Gustav’s center was about 20 miles southwest of Alexandria and lumbering northwest at about 13 mph. Forecasters expect the storm to weaken further to a tropical depression today as it moves toward northeastern Texas. Storm-surge flooding was expected to continue to subside overnight.
Authorities reported eight deaths related to the storm. All but one were traffic deaths, including four people killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree as they fled the storm. A 27-year-old Lafayette, La., man was killed when a tree fell on his house as the storm whipped through. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
In the days before the storm struck, nearly 2 million people fled coastal Louisiana under a mandatory evacuation order — a stark contrast from Katrina.
It could be days until the full extent of the damage is known, especially in the fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns of bayou country, where rapid erosion in recent decades has destroyed swamps and robbed the area of a natural buffer against storms.
In St. Mary Parish, to the west, Deputy Sheriff Troy Brown cleared roads with a chain saw as he went out to assess damage. He found uprooted trees and houses without some shingles, but few signs of monster hit.
“Even the mobile homes are sitting there in one piece,” Brown said.
Flood defenses stood fast
While Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, the surge this time in New Orleans reached 12 feet, near the top of the Industrial Canal, on the eastern side of the city.
Officials expressed confidence all day long that the flood defenses in the eastern part of the city would hold. They were more concerned about the West Bank of the Mississippi River, where the $15 billion in levee improvements begun after Katrina have yet to be completed. But those floodwalls appeared to be holding too.
In New Orleans, the storm brought only 3 inches of rain or less to the city. Police reported just two arrests.
