NEW ORLEANSDALLASGULF SHORES, Ala.BILOXI, Miss. — Three years ago, corpses lay rotting in the streets outside the Morial Convention Center. It was a scene so chaotic and depraved, even the police dared not venture inside.
During Hurricane Gustav, New Orleans police and the National Guard used the building as a barracks and staging area.
Some say the Big Easy lost its soul after Katrina. This time, the city didn’t even completely lose power.
As the storm was coming ashore Monday morning, patrons lined up for lattes at a Starbucks in the French Quarter.
Despite a citywide curfew, Johnny White’s sports bar — which brags that it doesn’t even have doors — continued its streak of never closing for a hurricane.
Benton Love and three friends drove over from Austin, Texas, and arrived at the bar Monday morning, just ahead of Gustav.
“I’d say we’re about six drinks deep,” the 30-year-old University of Texas marketing major said at 7:20 a.m. “We’ll probably switch to water about 10 o’clock, sober up and see if we can help out.”
Throughout the Quarter, the ratio of reporters to residents was easily 3 to 1, and likely greater.
Outside the Superdome, Staff Sgt. Patrick Abair of the Louisiana National Guard stood watch as Gustav’s last bands passed through. He said this storm left him with a much happier image — of watching people stream into Union Station around the corner, climb calmly onto buses and leave the city.
“This time, the people listened,” he said with a smile. “That was a good thing.”
Rain may keep shelters full
For some of the 2 million people seeking safety from Hurricane Gustav, they could run but they couldn’t hide.
The same storm they fled threatens to dump up to 2 feet of rain on parts of Texas and Louisiana, possibly keeping many evacuees from going home as quickly as they would like.
Nerves were already fraying at a shelter in Shreveport, La., where evacuees packed together for three days were starting to fight and question their decision to leave home in the first place.
The rusted, vacant Sam’s Warehouse converted into an evacuation center had a capacity of 2,600 people, but the crowd inside swelled to nearly 3,000 as stragglers arrived overnight. A single television allowed evacuees to see what was happening at home. Four or five minor fights broke out, shelter officials said.
“People are desperate. They don’t know if they are going to have a place to go home to,” said Emma McClure, 37, who was there with three children, three sisters and about 20 nephews. “They had three years to plan this, and now I wish I had stayed in the city like I did during Katrina.”
Some Louisiana residents said they were moved to action by authorities who urged nearly everyone to leave the storm’s path.
“They told us if we decided to stay, there would be no medical, no fire, no rescue,” said David Smith, 19, who was staying in a Dallas shelter where he arrived with 30 relatives from Deridder, La.
“You’ll either live to tell about it or you’ll die. They were pretty blunt.”
Even if officials overstated the risk, Smith said, “they were right for saying it.”
Redfish blow in
There’s a fable about redfish on this part of the Gulf Coast: Find the right spot and you can catch all you want during a hurricane. It’s true.
As Gustav battered Louisiana, anglers converged on a coastal fishing hole where salty lagoon water pushed inland by Gustav flowed through a marsh into a freshwater lake.
The wind whipped, the water frothed and the ground was littered with red drum, once widely considered trash but a prized catch ever since Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme figured out how to blacken them in a frying pan.
Johnny Howard was pulling redfish out of the coffee-colored water. He caught the legal limit of three in less than 30 minutes. A 3-year-old redfish typically weighs 6 to 8 pounds.
Miss. casinos’ feet wet
The ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Biloxi’s casino row was flooded during the storm surge from Gustav, and wind-whipped water continued to splash into its parking garage Monday afternoon.
Bobby Tuber, the casino’s facility-grounds manager, said that the storm put about 30 inches of water in the building but that the casino itself, located on an upper level, was not damaged.
“We’re fine. We’ll come out all well,” Tuber said as he and others used a pump and a large hose to remove the water.
The 12 casinos operating along the Mississippi coast a few years ago were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina’s winds and storm surge. At the time, state law required the gambling portion of the resorts to be located on barges in the water.
Mississippi lawmakers quickly changed the law, and 11 of the casinos have since rebuilt on land. In 2007, gamblers left behind $2.9 billion in Mississippi casinos, including $1.3 billion along the coast. The take translated into $332.3 million in tax revenue for state and local governments.
