Hurricane Gustav slams La.; 1M without power

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-02 06:53

A street at a railroad crossing near the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal is flooded as Hurricane Gustav hits New Orleans, Louisiana September 1, 2008. [Agencies]

NEW ORLEANS - 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 three years ago.

That did not mean the state survived the storm without damage. A levee in the southeast 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 1 million homes 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 come back 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 the levees, still only partially rebuilt after Katrina, would hold.

Flood protections along the canal broke with disastrous effect 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."

In the Upper Ninth Ward, about half the streets closest to the canal were flooded with ankle- to knee-deep water as the road dipped and rose. 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.

By mid afternoon Monday, the rain had stopped 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 southeast Louisiana was fearful their 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 around 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 feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.

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