HURRICANE SEASON 2008

[Bianca]

Thank you, Brooke!

We got by allright on this one too.....

We're actually seeing some sunshine, after some really gloomy and rainy days.

Thankfully, it seems everybody has been evacuated in the New Orleans critical zone.

Blessings on them all.

[Bianca]

                                      Gustav's eye closes in on Louisiana coastline





By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
and MARY FOSTER,
Associated Press Writer
28 minutes ago

Sept. 1, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Gustav steamed toward the Louisiana coast early Monday on track to hit west of New Orleans as the few remaining in the city watched nervously and hoped levees only partly reinforced in the three years since Katrina would hold.
 
Those who heeded days of warnings to get out watched from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away, praying the powerful Category 3 storm and its 115-mph winds would pass without the same deadly toll.

"We're nervous, but we just have to keep trusting in God that we don't get the water again," said Lyndon Guidry, who hit the road for Florida just a few months after he was able to return to his home in New Orleans. "We just have to put our faith in God."

Water gushed off buildings and flags hung in tatters, ripped to shreds in the high winds. But there were no reports of serious flooding, and only scattered clusters of power outages.

The painful memories of Katrina, which flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed more than 1,600 along the Gulf Coast, led officials to aggressively insist that everyone in Gustav's path flee from shore. As the storm grew near, the streets of the city were empty — save for National Guardsmen and just about every officer on the city's police force standing watch for looters.

In all, nearly 2 million people left south Louisiana, as did tens of thousands from coastal Mississippi, Alabama and southeastern Texas.

Even presidential politics bowed to the storm, as the Republican Party scaled back its convention plans in deference to Gustav's threat. Mindful of the government's inept response to Katrina, President Bush scrapped his Monday appearance at the convention and instead headed to Texas, where emergency response personnel were getting ready.

"It's amazing. It makes me feel really good that so many people are saying, 'We as Americans, we as the world, have to get this right this time,'" New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said. "We cannot afford to screw up again."

Asked what lessons he learned during Katrina that were being applied now, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told CBS: "Planning, preparation and moving early."

Gustav killed at least 94 people as it tore through the Caribbean and it will test three years of planning and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast following Katrina's wrath. Billions of dollars were at stake, as Gustav threatened industries ranging from sugar to shipping. If production is significantly interrupted from the region's refineries and offshore oil and gas platforms, price spikes could hit all Americans at the pump.

Officials promised they were ready to respond this time. Chertoff said search and rescue would be the top priority once the storm passed: high-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room were posted around the strike zone.

"I feel a little nervous about the storm and exactly where it's going to end up, but I also feel real good about the resources," Nagin said. "Man, if we have resources, we can move mountains."

Forecasters had expected Gustav to strengthen further before making landfall around midday, but early Monday they said the storm would hold steady as a Category 3. Katrina also made landfall as a strong Category 3, which carries sustained winds of between 111 mph and 130 mph.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the storm's center was located about 85 miles south of New Orleans and was moving northwest at 16 mph.

The city of Franklin, about 100 miles west of New Orleans, was bracing for a direct hit if Gustav stays on its current track. Dozens of sheriff's deputies, along with state troopers and guardsmen, waited at an emergency operations center inside the courthouse.

"We don't rely on backup. If it comes, great, but we don't trust the federal government. They can never get it quite right," said state Rep. Sam Jones.

He estimated that at least three-quarters of the city's roughly 9,000 residents evacuated for Gustav. For good reason: Three years ago, Hurricane Rita flooded up to 200 homes in the city.

Tropical storm-force winds reached the southeastern tip of the state early Monday morning, but local officials said they had not received any distress calls or reports of unexpected flooding.

In Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, officials built an emergency levee to prevent flooding along a highway that runs along the Mississippi River, sheriff's spokesman Maj. John Marie said.

But it was extremely quiet. "It's really remarkable, we got almost everybody out," he said.

In New Orleans, officials were anxiously watching to see what kind of storm surge the city would face: If forecasts hold, the city could experience a storm surge of only 4 to 6 feet, compared to a surge of 10 to 14 feet at the site of landfall, said Corey Walton, a hurricane support meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center.

Katrina, by comparison, brought a storm surge of 25 feet, causing levees to break. While the Army Corps of Engineers has shored up some of the city's levee system since then, fears this time center on the city's West Bank, where levee repairs have not been completed.

City officials were pleased so many residents heeded warnings to leave. They estimated only about 100,000 along the coast decided to tough it out.

"When the 911 calls start coming in, we'll know how many people are left in town," said police superintendent Warren Riley.

The city's emergency medical service had received only 26 calls as of midnight Monday, a fraction of what they received on the night before Katrina, spokesman Jeb Tate said.

Adam Woods didn't need to be told to leave. A Coast Guard helicopter plucked him off his roof after Katrina, and this time, he and his lab mix Mandela headed to the city's Union Station for a ride out of town.

"I've got oxygen in my lungs," the 53-year-old landscaper said. "Remember, you've got to be alive to have problems."

Jeffrey Carreras was among those staying behind. Looters wreaked havoc in his neighborhood restaurant in the days after Katrina struck and despite promises of police protection, he wasn't willing to leave his business a second time.

"I have shotguns, rifles. I collect guns actually," Carreras said. "So I have plenty of guns in there, plenty of ammo."

Gustav was the seventh named storm in the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth, Tropical Storm Hanna, was strengthening about 100 miles from the Bahamas. Though a storm's track and intensity are difficult to predict days in advance, long-term projections showed the storm could come ashore along the border of Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.

___

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.

[Bianca]

                                          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.

[Bianca]

FEARS OF ANOTHER KATRINA



Gustav's approach had stirred uneasy comparisons to Katrina, the most costly hurricane in U.S. history, which killed some 1,500 people and caused over $80 billion in damage almost exactly three years earlier.

President George W. Bush, who was criticized for the slow relief efforts after Katrina, canceled his appearance at the Republican convention as scheduled instead a visit to Texas on Monday to oversee emergency response effort.

McCain went to Gulf on Sunday to survey preparations and ordered political speeches canceled on Monday for his nominating convention, apparently concerned that television images of a choreographed Republican celebration while the storm was hitting Louisiana would be seen as out of touch.

Long lines of cars and buses streamed out of New Orleans on Sunday after its mayor, Ray Nagin, ordered an evacuation of the city of 239,000 and told residents, "This is still a big, ugly storm, still strong and I encourage everyone to leave."

New Orleans resident Vanessa Jones, 50, said she had planned to stay but changed her mind after watching the news all night. "I can't take a chance because so many people died in Katrina," she said as she prepared to board a bus headed to an unknown destination.

The government lined up trains and hundreds of buses to evacuate 30,000 people who could not leave on their own and Nagin said 15,000 had been removed from the city, including hundreds in wheelchairs.

Flights from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities were canceled on Monday as the storm bore down on the region.

Residents boarded up the windows of their shops and homes before leaving town, while others hunkered down as "hold-outs" with stockpiled food, water and shotguns to ward off looters.

"I saw quite a bit of looting last time with Katrina, even 30 minutes after the winds had stopped," said construction contractor Norwood Thornton, who opted to stay behind to protect his home in New Orleans' historic Garden District.

In its run through the Caribbean, Gustav earlier killed at least 86 people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.

The U.S. Coast Guard reported the first storm-related death in Florida on Sunday, where a man fell overboard as his craft ran into heavy waves.

Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which followed it three weeks later, wrecked more than 100 Gulf oil platforms.

(Additional reporting by Tom Brown in Miami and Bruce Nichols, Chris Baltimore and Erwin Seba in Houston; Writing by Kevin Krolicki; editing by Jim Loney and Kieran Murray)

[Bianca]

                                     Gustav weakens as it lashes Louisiana coast






By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
and MARY FOSTER,
Associated Press Writer
1 minute ago

Sept. 1, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Gustav weakened to a Category 2 storm as it steamed toward the Louisiana coast early Monday, on track to hit west of New Orleans as the few remaining in the city watched nervously and hoped levees only partly reinforced in the three years since Katrina would hold.
 
Those who heeded days of warnings to get out watched from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away, praying the powerful storm would pass without the same deadly toll.

"We're nervous, but we just have to keep trusting in God that we don't get the water again," said Lyndon Guidry, who hit the road for Florida just a few months after he was able to return to his home in New Orleans. "We just have to put our faith in God."

Water gushed off buildings and flags hung in tatters, ripped to shreds in the high winds. But there were no reports of serious flooding, and only scattered clusters of power outages.

The painful memories of Katrina, which flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed more than 1,600 along the Gulf Coast, led officials to aggressively insist that everyone in Gustav's path flee from shore. As the storm grew near, the streets of the city were empty — save for National Guardsmen and just about every officer on the city's police force standing watch for looters.

In all, nearly 2 million people left south Louisiana, as did tens of thousands from coastal Mississippi, Alabama and southeastern Texas.

Even presidential politics bowed to the storm, as the Republican Party scaled back its convention plans in deference to Gustav's threat. Mindful of the government's inept response to Katrina, President Bush scrapped his Monday appearance at the convention and instead headed to Texas, where emergency response personnel were getting ready.

"It's amazing. It makes me feel really good that so many people are saying, 'We as Americans, we as the world, have to get this right this time,'" New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said. "We cannot afford to screw up again."

Asked what lessons he learned during Katrina that were being applied now, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told CBS: "Planning, preparation and moving early."

Gustav killed at least 94 people as it tore through the Caribbean and it will test three years of planning and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast following Katrina's wrath. Billions of dollars were at stake, as Gustav threatened industries ranging from sugar to shipping. If production is significantly interrupted from the region's refineries and offshore oil and gas platforms, price spikes could hit all Americans at the pump.

Officials promised they were ready to respond this time. Chertoff said search and rescue would be the top priority once the storm passed: high-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room were posted around the strike zone.

"I feel a little nervous about the storm and exactly where it's going to end up, but I also feel real good about the resources," Nagin said. "Man, if we have resources, we can move mountains."

Forecasters had expected Gustav to strengthen further before making landfall around midday, but early Monday they said the storm would hold steady as a Category 3. Katrina also made landfall as a strong Category 3, which carries sustained winds of between 111 mph and 130 mph.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the storm's center was located about 85 miles south of New Orleans and was moving northwest at 16 mph.

The city of Franklin, about 100 miles west of New Orleans, was bracing for a direct hit if Gustav stays on its current track. Dozens of sheriff's deputies, along with state troopers and guardsmen, waited at an emergency operations center inside the courthouse.

"We don't rely on backup. If it comes, great, but we don't trust the federal government. They can never get it quite right," said state Rep. Sam Jones.

He estimated that at least three-quarters of the city's roughly 9,000 residents evacuated for Gustav. For good reason: Three years ago, Hurricane Rita flooded up to 200 homes in the city.

Tropical storm-force winds reached the southeastern tip of the state early Monday morning, but local officials said they had not received any distress calls or reports of unexpected flooding.

In Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, officials built an emergency levee to prevent flooding along a highway that runs along the Mississippi River, sheriff's spokesman Maj. John Marie said.

But it was extremely quiet. "It's really remarkable, we got almost everybody out," he said.

In New Orleans, officials were anxiously watching to see what kind of storm surge the city would face: If forecasts hold, the city could experience a storm surge of only 4 to 6 feet, compared to a surge of 10 to 14 feet at the site of landfall, said Corey Walton, a hurricane support meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center.

Katrina, by comparison, brought a storm surge of 25 feet, causing levees to break. While the Army Corps of Engineers has shored up some of the city's levee system since then, fears this time center on the city's West Bank, where levee repairs have not been completed.

City officials were pleased so many residents heeded warnings to leave. They estimated only about 100,000 along the coast decided to tough it out.

"When the 911 calls start coming in, we'll know how many people are left in town," said police superintendent Warren Riley.

The city's emergency medical service had received only 26 calls as of midnight Monday, a fraction of what they received on the night before Katrina, spokesman Jeb Tate said.

Adam Woods didn't need to be told to leave. A Coast Guard helicopter plucked him off his roof after Katrina, and this time, he and his lab mix Mandela headed to the city's Union Station for a ride out of town.

"I've got oxygen in my lungs," the 53-year-old landscaper said. "Remember, you've got to be alive to have problems."

Jeffrey Carreras was among those staying behind. Looters wreaked havoc in his neighborhood restaurant in the days after Katrina struck and despite promises of police protection, he wasn't willing to leave his business a second time.

"I have shotguns, rifles. I collect guns actually," Carreras said. "So I have plenty of guns in there, plenty of ammo."

Gustav was the seventh named storm in the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth, Tropical Storm Hanna, was strengthening about 100 miles from the Bahamas. Though a storm's track and intensity are difficult to predict days in advance, long-term projections showed the storm could come ashore along the border of Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.

___

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.

[Bianca]

                                  Gustav weakens, closes in on Louisiana coastline






By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
and MARY FOSTER,
Associated Press Writer

5 minutes ago
Sept. 1, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - A weakened Hurricane Gustav closed in on flood-prone coastal Louisiana Monday, bringing punishing wind and sheets of rain. But the storm veered away from New Orleans, where only a few holdouts and those that refused to abandon Bourbon Street remained.
 
Gusts snapped large branches from the majestic oak trees that form a canopy over St. Charles Avenue. Tens of thousands were without power in New Orleans and other low-lying parishes, but officials said backup generators were keeping city drainage pumps in service.

As a nervous nation watched to see if Gustav would deliver another Katrina-style hit on the partially rebuilt city, officials steadfastly insisted three years of planning and infrastructure upgrades had prepared them for whatever was to come.

"We don't expect the loss of life, certainly, that we saw in Katrina," Federal Emergency Management Agency Deputy Director Harvey E. Johnson told The Associated Press. "But we are expecting a lot of homes to be damaged, a lot of infrastructure to be flooded, and damaged severely."

On the high ground in the French Quarter, nasty winds 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 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."

FEMA estimated there were only about 10,000 people left in the city, and the state said about 100,000 remained on the coast. Nearly 2 million people answered the call to leave south Louisiana in the days before Gustav's arrival, a massive evacuation effort designed to avoid the nearly 1,600 deaths suffered when Hurricane Katrina struck an unprepared Gulf Coast in 2005.

New Orleans police superintendent Warren Riley said there had been no reports of looting or calls for rescue. The Superdome was locked up and city officials stuck to their pledge not to open a shelter of last resort. Public officials sternly warned in the days leading up to the storm that anyone leaving their homes after a dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed would be swiftly thrown behind bars.

"We're determined to keep this city safe for our people," he said.

Evacuees watched television coverage from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away, praying the powerful Category 2 storm and its 115-mph winds would pass without the exacting Katrina's toll.

"We're nervous, but we just have to keep trusting in God that we don't get the water again," said Lyndon Guidry, who hit the road for Florida just a few months after he was able to return to his home in New Orleans. "We just have to put our faith in God."

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

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 Hurricane Katrina. The village provides affordable housing for musicians and others who lost their homes in Katrina's flooding.

He described a frustrating scene outside the shelter, where elderly evacuees and young children had to wait to be searched and processed before going inside.

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

Gustav killed at least 94 people as it tore through the Caribbean before moving into the oil-rich Gulf. Billions of dollars were at stake, as Gustav threatened industries ranging from sugar to shipping. If production is significantly interrupted from the region's refineries and offshore oil and gas platforms, price spikes could hit all Americans at the pump.

Officials promised they were ready to respond this time. Johnson said FEMA had stockpiled enough food, water, ice and other supplies to take care of 1 million victims for three days. Also in place were high-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing planes, plus Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room.

"It's amazing. It makes me feel really good that so many people are saying, 'We as Americans, we as the world, have to get this right this time,'" New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said. "We cannot afford to screw up again."

Even presidential politics bowed to the storm, as the Republican Party scaled back its convention plans in deference to Gustav's threat. Battered by criticism that the government's response to Katrina was inadequate, President Bush scrapped his Monday appearance at the convention and instead headed to Texas to monitor the storm.

Gustav weakened Monday to a Category 2 storm as its eyewall rolled onto land. Katrina made landfall as a strong Category 3, which has sustained winds of between 111 mph and 130 mph.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the storm's center was located about 85 miles south of New Orleans and was moving northwest at 16 mph. It had top sustained winds of 110 mph.

The city of Franklin, about 100 miles west of New Orleans, was bracing for a direct hit if Gustav stays on its current track. Dozens of sheriff's deputies, along with state troopers and guardsmen, waited at an emergency operations center inside the courthouse.

"We don't rely on backup. If it comes, great, but we don't trust the federal government. They can never get it quite right," said state Rep. Sam Jones.

He estimated that at least three-quarters of the city's roughly 9,000 residents evacuated. For good reason: Three years ago, Hurricane Rita flooded up to 200 homes in the city.

In Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, officials built an emergency levee to prevent flooding along a highway that runs along the Mississippi River, sheriff's spokesman Maj. John Marie said.

But it was extremely quiet. "It's really remarkable, we got almost everybody out," he said.

In New Orleans, officials were anxiously watching to see what kind of storm surge the city would face: If forecasts hold, the city could experience a storm surge of only 4 to 6 feet, compared to a surge of 10 to 14 feet at the site of landfall, said Corey Walton, a hurricane support meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center.

Katrina, by comparison, brought a storm surge of 25 feet, causing levees to break. While the Army Corps of Engineers has shored up some of the city's levee system since then, fears this time center on the city's West Bank, where levee repairs have not been completed.

Gustav was the seventh named storm in the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth, Tropical Storm Hanna, was strengthening about 100 miles from the Bahamas. Though a storm's track and intensity are difficult to predict days in advance, long-term projections showed the storm could come ashore along the border of Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.

___

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.

[Bianca]

                                    Gustav slams La. coastline west of New Orleans






By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
and MARY FOSTER,
Associated Press Writer
1 minute ago
 
Sept. 1, 2008


NEW ORLEANS - A weakened 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.
 
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. 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. There were no immediate reports of any damage to the canal.

Mayor Ray Nagin said the city wouldn't know until late afternoon if the vulnerable West Bank would stay dry. Worries about the level of flood protection in an area where enhancements to the levees are years from completion were a key reason Nagin was so insistent residents evacuate the city.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie (pronounced ko-ko-DREE), 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. Forecasters had feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.

As of noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.

The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors — oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams — have destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.

Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike. A risk modeling firm, Eqecat Inc., projected Monday that Gustav could knock capacity for about 5 percent of both oil and natural gas production for the next year. The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half the nation's refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output.

Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.

The nation was nervously watching to see how New Orleans would deal with Gustav almost exactly three years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed roughly 1,600 people.

This time, nearly 2 million people fled the coast, many of them under a mandatory evacuation order issed by the mayor of New Orleans. Officials estimated only about 100,000 stayed put along the coast, and about 10,000 were still in New Orleans. Federal, state and local officials took a never-again stance after Katrina and set to work planning and upgrading flood defenses in the below-sea-level city.

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.

___

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

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                                         Gustav loses steam after bulldozing south La.






By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
and MARY FOSTER,
Associated Press Writers
3 minutes ago

Sept. 1, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Gustav is quickly losing its punch after plowing through south Louisiana's fishing and oil industry.


 
The National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm to a Category 1 storm with 90-mph winds Monday afternoon as it sideswiped New Orleans and pushed through the state toward Texas.

Gustav arrived with 110-mph winds and storm surge that had water splashing over the top of the floodwall of the Industrial Canal along the 9th Ward in New Orleans.

But the hurricane's wind and surge haven't been nearly as fearsome as forecasters had predicted.

The storm is expected to move into Texas overnight and drop as much as 20 inches of rain there by Thursday.



THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) —



A weakened 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.

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. 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. There were no immediate reports of any damage to the canal.

Mayor Ray Nagin said the city wouldn't know until late afternoon if the vulnerable West Bank would stay dry. Worries about the level of flood protection in an area where enhancements to the levees are years from completion were a key reason Nagin was so insistent residents evacuate the city.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie (pronounced ko-ko-DREE), 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. Forecasters had feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.

As of noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.

The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors — oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams — have destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.

Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike. A risk modeling firm, Eqecat Inc., projected Monday that Gustav could knock capacity for about 5 percent of both oil and natural gas production for the next year. The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half the nation's refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output.

Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.

The nation was nervously watching to see how New Orleans would deal with Gustav almost exactly three years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed roughly 1,600 people.

This time, nearly 2 million people fled the coast, many of them under a mandatory evacuation order issed by the mayor of New Orleans. Officials estimated only about 100,000 stayed put along the coast, and about 10,000 were still in New Orleans. Federal, state and local officials took a never-again stance after Katrina and set to work planning and upgrading flood defenses in the below-sea-level city.

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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.

___

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.

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                                   New Orleans largely spared by Hurricane Gustav






By ROBERT TANNER and
VICKI SMITH,
Associated Press Writers
Sept. 2, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans evacuees scattered across the country were eager to return home after their city was largely spared by Hurricane Gustav, but Mayor Ray Nagin warned they may have to wait in shelters and motels a few days longer.
 
The city's improved levee system helped avert a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which flooded most of the city, and officials got an assist from a disorganized and weakened Gustav, which came ashore about 72 miles southwest of the city Monday morning. Eight deaths were attributed to the storm in the U.S. after it killed at least 94 people across the Caribbean.

But New Orleans was still a city that took a glancing blow from a hurricane: A mandatory evacuation order and curfew remained in effect. And though few people were left in the city, nearly 80,000 homes remained without power after the storm damaged transmission lines that snapped like rubber bands in the wind and knocked 35 substations out of service.

The city's sewer system was 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.

Gustav was downgraded to a tropical depression early Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. At 5 a.m. EDT, the storm's maximum sustained winds had decreased to near 35 mph, but forecasters issued flood warnings for northern Louisiana and East Texas, where up to 8 inches of rain was expected. The storm's center was located about 135 miles northwest of Lafayette and was moving northwest at about 10 mph.

Nagin cautioned that Tuesday would be too early for residents to return to New Orleans, but their homecoming was "only days away, not weeks."

Crews would comb the city Tuesday to fully review the damage, Nagin said, with the goal of having residents return beginning late Wednesday or Thursday. Retailers and other major companies could start sending workers Wednesday to check on their locations, he said. Buses are in place and ready to bring residents back with instructions to drop them off as close as possible to their homes.

The state and city took pride in a massive evacuation effort that succeeded in urging people to leave or catch buses and trains out: Almost 2 million people left coastal Louisiana, and only about 10,000 people rode out the storm in New Orleans.

"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."

But thousands of people were strained by sleeping in cots in gymnasiums and convention centers, far away from their homes and wondering when they could go back. Fights broke out at an overcrowded shelter in Shreveport. Doctors worried about medications running out and seven people were hospitalized, all in stable condition.

"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 at the shelter with her three children, three sisters and some 20 nephews. "They had three years to plan this and now I wish I had stayed in the city like I did during Katrina."

Though the big city was spared, Gustav devastated parts of Cajun country, destroying homes and flooding parts of the mostly rural, low-lying parishes across the state's southeastern and central coast that are also home to the state's oil and natural gas industries.

Four evacuating Louisianans were killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree. A 27-year-old Lafayette man was killed when a tree fell on his house as the storm whipped through, and an Abbeville couple was killed when a tree fell on a home in Baton Rouge. A woman from Jefferson was killed Monday when her vehicle ran off Interstate 10 and struck a tree.

A levee in the southeastern part of Louisiana was in danger of collapse, and officials scrambled to fortify it. Roofs were torn from homes, trees toppled and roads flooded. A ferry sunk. More than 1 million homes were without power. And the extent of any damage to the oil and gas industries was unclear.

Gov. Bobby Jindal said he heard reports of widespread damage across Terrebonne, Lafourche and St. Mary parishes. He said conditions were still too dangerous Monday night to send teams to assess the damage, but the effort to find injured or killed people would begin before dawn with helicopter crews using night-vision technology.

It could be a day or more before oil and natural gas companies can assess the damage to their drilling and refining installations. Jindal said as much as 20 percent of oil and gas production that was stopped because of Gustav could be restored by this weekend, stressing that it was a rough estimate.

To the east of the city, Jindal said state officials were planning an aerial tour on Tuesday to gauge damage to Port Fourchon, a vital energy industry hub where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries.

The Gulf of Mexico accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output. Damage to those installations could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike, although oil prices declined Monday. Several companies that operate platforms in the area said their platforms remained intact, but they needed to inspect them before they could restart production.

Two houses built up on pilings to avoid flooding were not spared by the wind that tore through Montegut, a small Terrebonne Parish town south of Houma.

Across a narrow bayou running past the houses, globs of yellow insulation had collected in a tree and a neighbor's chain-link fence.

One of the homes had part of a wall ripped away, exposing a room with two plaques on the wall, one of which read: "Ashley Pennison, 2000-2001 honor graduate, 3.5 GPA."

The remnants of her childhood lay scattered about the soggy grass, including strung-together letter-shaped pillows spelling out her first name along with an assortment of miniature clowns.

Danny Price, the owner of a grocery store across the street, said he stayed home for the storm, but he might not the next time.

"I got scared," he said. "It was bad when the wind started rolling in. This was a picture to see: trees snapping off, fences blowing down and that wind just coming down the driveway over 100 miles per hour. It gets you scared. It's not something to play with. I don't think I'm going to stay for another one."

___

Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer, Cain Burdeau, Allen G. Breed contributed to this report from New Orleans. Janet McConnaughey and Alan Sayre contributed from Hammond. Doug Simpson in Baton Rouge, Michael Kunzelman in Lafayette, La., Vicki Smith in Montegut, La., and Holbrook Mohr in Gulfport, Miss., also contributed.

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                                      Gustav no Katrina, but exposes flaws in levees






By CAIN BURDEAU,
Associated Press Writer
Mon Sep 2, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS - Waves crashed high against flood walls Monday and New Orleans' rebuilt levee system survived its first hurricane in three years, but Gustav exposed weaknesses the Army Corps of Engineers won't plug any time soon.
 
Gustav was no Katrina. It was smaller, and the worst rain and wind missed New Orleans. Its storm surge — between 10 and 15 feet lower than Katrina's — entered New Orleans through navigation channels in the east and washed over the Industrial Canal.

The Industrial Canal has been characterized as the Achilles' heel in the system, and the corps is spending $700 million on a barrier at its mouth to stop surges. But the barrier won't be in place until at least 2011. On Monday, water overtopped parts of the canal's flood wall causing minor flooding in some parts of the Ninth Ward.

Another major weakness in the flood protection system is in the area known as the West Bank, where about 250,000 live. Gustav had been expected to seriously test those levees, but by Monday evening officials said water wasn't rising as much as was feared during Gustav's approach. Work on the West Bank is far from complete. The corps has repeatedly said it may be the city's weakest flank.

By Monday evening, however, the threat to most of New Orleans had subsided and levee officials felt confident the city would be spared flooding.

"All the walls have performed as they were designed to," said Maj. Tim Kurgan, a corps spokesman. "Scour protection has done what it was supposed to."

Scour protection — basically concrete pads behind floodwalls — is among a number of improvements in $2 billion in work to better protect New Orleans since Katrina flooded the city, bringing criticism and pressure on the corps.

Critics were quick to congratulate the agency.

"They did much better this time," said Ray Seed, a levee expert with the University of California-Berkeley who's studied the Katrina disaster and the city's levee system.

But Gustav barely tested some potential trouble spots as water levels in Lake Pontchartrain rose only moderately. Two of the canals — the 17th Street and London Avenue — were breached during Katrina and caused widespread flooding.

The corps' system of pumps and floodgates on the canals has been plagued with problems.

Any sigh of relief is premature and could even be risky, Seed said.

"The great danger is that people will become complacent," Seed said. "Gustav should be a lesson that tells us we have to keep moving."

New Orleans remains extremely vulnerable, said Paul Kemp, an oceanographer with the National Audubon Society.

"The fact that we have had in three years three of these storms, that threatened everybody in coastal Louisiana, shutdown all the offshore activities, it seems that this is a vulnerability that needs to be addressed more seriously," Kemp said.

In many ways, Katrina was a turning point for flood protection in southeastern Louisiana. Since Katrina, Congress has approved $14.8 billion in construction for New Orleans' levees. The corps says it will finish that work by 2011, making the city safe from severe hurricanes.

But for Louisianans, there is no time to waste. For the past century, south Louisiana has lost staggering amounts of wetlands — about 2,000 square miles. The loss of wetlands, marsh land and barrier islands has made the fragile delta a permanent disaster zone as the Gulf of Mexico gets closer with each passing hurricane season.

"We should have been building this system 30 years ago," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

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                                           As Gustav winds down, New Orleans eyes damage






By Matthew Bigg and
Tim Gaynor
Tue Sep 2, 2008
 
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - A still-largely deserted New Orleans on Tuesday prepared to take stock of damage from Hurricane Gustav after rebuilt levees appeared to hold off a repeat of the flooding caused by Katrina three years earlier.
 
Gustav roared through the heart of the U.S. Gulf oil patch but oil and natural gas prices plunged when Gustav weakened before landfall and spared key Gulf oil installations, easing fears of serious supply disruptions.

As the hurricane's winds slowed, it also stayed on a westerly track, missing New Orleans in a twist that helped keep it from becoming the monster storm feared just days earlier.

By early Tuesday, Gustav had weakened to become a tropical depression as it dumped rain over western Louisiana, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

But the storm surge kicked up by Gustav tested a levee system still being rebuilt after collapsing during Katrina. A tense vigil followed into Monday night for any sign of the kind of deluge of three years ago when 80 percent of New Orleans flooded and thousands were stranded.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers closed massive new floodgates built after Katrina and intended to keep Lake Pontchartrain waters from surging back toward the south into the city and over the banks of two canals.

Although water flowed over flood walls and spurted through cracks, a flood barrier system which officials had warned left New Orleans vulnerable appeared to hold up.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said residents could begin to return to the city later this week. With the city still under curfew, officials will assess hurricane damage on Tuesday and begin allowing businesses to return as soon as Wednesday.

"Reentry is only days away and not weeks away," Nagin said.

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DODGED A BULLET



Some residents emerged from boarded up homes relieved to find only broken tree branches and toppled signs.

"We'll still get some nasty weather but we've dodged a big-time bullet with this one," said stockbroker Peter Labouisse, sitting on the porch of his home, which was shuttered and without power.

Louisiana officials reported six storm-related deaths, including an elderly couple in Baton Rouge who were killed when a tree fell on their home.

In contrast to the widespread lawlessness that followed Katrina, New Orleans police said they had only arrested two people for looting during the storm.

Oil companies had shut down nearly all production in the region, which normally pumps a quarter of U.S. oil output and 15 percent of its natural gas.

But when early reports showed little damage to the crucial patch of energy infrastructure, oil prices slid to a five-month low and were seen headed toward $100 per barrel on Tuesday.

Exxon said it was shutting down its Baton Rouge refinery, the second largest in the United States. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Exxon would ask for crude oil from the U.S. emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve and Shell Oil Co was expected to make a similar request, as refiners look to ensure gasoline supplies in the wake of Gustav.

Mindful of the ravages of Katrina, which killed some 1,500 people, nearly 2 million people had fled the Gulf Coast as Gustav approached.

Underscoring continued concern about the fragile flood barriers, officials in rural Plaquemines Parish told the handful of residents remaining to flee as a levee protecting 200 homes had been weakened by water surging over the top.

Plaquemines, a fishing hub that sprawls into the Gulf of Mexico, was hammered by a 20-foot (6-meter) storm surge during Katrina.

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BUSH RESPONSE



Gustav stole the limelight from the Republican Convention to nominate presidential candidate John McCain. It opened on Monday with a bare-bones program.

President George W. Bush, who was heavily criticized for the slow Katrina relief efforts, canceled his appearance at the convention and went to Texas to oversee relief effort.

A dangerous Category 4 hurricane a few days ago, Gustav hit shore near Cocodrie, Louisiana, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm, one step below Katrina's strength at landfall.

Initial loss estimates from Gustav were far below those for Katrina, which caused total loses of more than $80 billion, making it the costliest hurricane in U.S. history.

EQECAT Inc., which helps insurers model catastrophe risk, said it estimated Gustav's insured losses at $6 billion to $10 billion. AIR Worldwide Corp., another firm that provides models for the financial risk from disasters, estimated that Gustav had caused up to $4.5 billion in losses on land and up to another $4.4 billion to offshore oil and gas installations.

Before landfall in Louisiana, Gustav killed at least 97 people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Florida.

As fears over Gustav eased, Tropical Storm Hanna grew to hurricane strength near the southeast Bahamas, threatening the U.S. east coast from Florida to the Carolinas, and Tropical Storm Ike formed in the Atlantic Ocean.

Meanwhile, a new tropical depression formed in the far eastern Atlantic Ocean south of the Cape Verde Islands and was expected to become a tropical storm later on Tuesday.

The depression, which will be dubbed Tropical Storm Josephine once its maximum sustained winds reach 39 miles per hour (64 kph), was located 170 miles southeast of the Cape Verde Islands.

It marks the 10th tropical depression of this year's busy Atlantic hurricane season.




(Additional reporting by Tom Brown in Miami, Lilla Zuill in New York, David Alexander and Sandra Maler in Washington, and Bruce Nichols, Chris Baltimore and Erwin Seba in Houston; Writing by Jim Loney and Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Mary Milliken and Sandra Maler)