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                                          Hurricane Gustav pounds Louisiana coast





By Tim Gaynor
and Matthew Bigg
Sept. 1, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Hurricane Gustav lashed the Louisiana coast on Monday with pounding rain and heavy winds, posing the biggest threat to the New Orleans area since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
 
Gustav was expected to make landfall before midday as a Category 3 hurricane, but its outer bands were already hitting the Gulf coast early on Monday.

Nearly 2 million people fled the Gulf coast in one of the biggest evacuations in U.S. history. More than 11 million residents in five U.S. states were threatened by the fast-moving storm.

Oil companies shut down nearly all production in the energy-rich Gulf of Mexico, a region that normally pumps a quarter of U.S. oil output and 15 percent of its natural gas.

But Gustav failed to draw as much power as once feared as it rolled across warm Gulf of Mexico waters. Forecasters said it was unlikely to grow stronger now and would begin to weaken as it moves inland.

U.S. crude oil futures slipped to below $115 a barrel on Monday morning as fears of major damage to oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico eased. Prices had hit more than $118 per barrel in a special trading session on Sunday.

Hurricane Gustav also took center stage in U.S. politics as Republicans prepared to open their convention on Monday to nominate presidential candidate John McCain with a bare-bones program stripped of the usual pomp and circumstance.

The eye of the storm was on track to hit west of New Orleans, sparing the city a direct hit from the worst of its gusting winds.

But the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Gustav was still likely toss up "an extremely dangerous storm surge" of up to 14 feet that could test the holding power of rebuilt levees that failed during Hurricane Katrina.

By Sunday night, the streets of New Orleans were ghostly quiet after some 95 percent of the city's population responded to desperate calls by officials for a sweeping evacuation.

Hurricane Katrina brought a 28-foot storm surge that burst levees on August 29, 2005 and flooded some 80 percent of New Orleans, which sits partly below sea level. The city degenerated into chaos as stranded storm victims waited days for government rescue and law and order collapsed.

An estimated 1.9 million people fled coastal areas as Hurricane Gustav drew closer, state officials said.

Only 10,000 people were believed to have stayed behind in New Orleans. Police and several thousand national guard troops patrolled the empty city, sometimes in convoys of Humvees, as a curfew went into effect in a bid to prevent looting.

On Monday morning, Gustav was packing maximum sustained winds of 115 mph, making it a Category 3 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.

It was expected to swamp parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas with up to 12 inches of rain and 20 inches in some small areas. Isolated tornadoes were also possible.