Message #100103

[Bianca]

In Texas, President Bush applauded the efforts.

"The coordination on this storm is a lot better than on — than during Katrina," Bush said noting how the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had been working in concert. "It was clearly a spirit of sharing assets, of listening to somebody's problems and saying, `How can we best address them?'"

For all their seeming 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 Mississippi coast. Gustav skirted along Louisiana's shoreline at "a more gentle angle," said National Weather Service storm surge specialist Will Shaffer.

Initial reports indicated storm surge of about 8 feet above normal tides, but forecasts indicated up to 14 feet in surge was possible.

"Right now, we feel we're not going to have a true inundation," said Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of the $15 billion project to rebuild the Army Corps of Engineers' levee and floodwalls in the New Orleans-area.

Still, Nagin urged everyone to "resist the temptation to say we're out of the woods." He said Gustav's heavy rainfall could still flood the saucer-shaped city over the next 24 hours as tropical storm-force winds blast through the city. Winds were 36 mph near City Hall on Monday morning, with higher gusts.

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. The city would first need to assess damage and determine if any neighborhoods were unsafe.

Gusts snapped large branches from the majestic oak trees that form a canopy over New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue. More than 500,000 customers in south Louisiana were without power at midday, but officials in New Orleans said backup generators were keeping city drainage pumps in service.

On the high ground in the French Quarter, the wind whipped signs and the purple, green and gold Mardi Gras flags hanging from cast-iron balconies. Like the rest of the city, the Quarter's normally boisterous streets were deserted save for a police officer standing watch every few blocks and a few early morning drinkers in the city's world-famous bars.

"We wanted to be part of a historic event," said Benton Love, 30, stood outside Johnny White's Sports Bar with a whiskey and Diet Coke. "We knew Johnny White's would be the place to be. We'll probably switch to water about 10 o'clock, sober up, and see if we can help out."

Public officials warned in the days leading up to the storm that anyone leaving their homes after a dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed would be thrown in jail.

Evacuees watched TV coverage from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away.

Harmonica player J.D. Hill said he was standing in line Monday morning to get into a public shelter in Bossier City in northwestern Louisiana after waiting on a state-provided evacuation bus that carried him to safety.

"There's the funky bus bathrooms, people can't sleep, we're not being told anything. We're at their mercy," he said.

Hill was the first resident of the Musicians' Village, a cluster of homes Harry Connick Jr. and fellow New Orleans musician Branford Marsalis built through Habitat for Humanity after Katrina. The village provides housing for musicians and others who lost their homes to Katrina. So far, the group of the homes was intact — on one porch, a decorated banner reading "Welcome Friends" survived the winds and was still hanging.

In Mississippi, officials said a 15-foot storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns devastated by Katrina. Officials said at least three people near the Jordan River had to be rescued from the floodwaters. Elsewhere in the state, an abandoned building in Gulfport collapsed and a few homes in Biloxi were flooded.

Gustav was the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth, Tropical Storm Hanna, was strengthening about 40 miles north of the Bahamas. Forecasters said it could come ashore in Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.

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Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer,

Janet McConnaughey,

Robert Tanner,

Cain Burdeau,

Alan Sayre, and

Allen G. Breed



contributed to this report from New Orleans.





Vicki Smith in Houma and
Doug Simpson in Baton Rouge also contributed.





Michael Kunzelman reported from Lafayette, La.,





and Holbrook Mohr contributed from Gulfport, Miss.