Gustav may or may not prove to be the “Mother of all Storms” but clearly Mayor Nagin doesn’t want to wait to find out. It will be either a Category 3 or 4 storm when it does reach landfall on the US coast sometime Monday.
NEW ORLEANS, Aug 31 (Reuters) – Hurricane Gustav churned toward the Louisiana coast through the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico on Sunday with strength that could rival 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, prompting low-lying New Orleans to begin evacuation.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin late on Saturday ordered the city’s 239,000 residents to leave in the face of “the mother of all storms.”
If Gustav lands west of New Orleans as expected, as a Category 4 hurricane with wind speeds up to 155 mph (249 kph), its 25-foot (7.6 metre) storm surge could break through the same levees that failed three year ago and swamp the city.
More than 11.5 million U.S. residents in five states could feel the impact of the massive storm.
This is frankly, the worst thing that could happen to the people of the Gulf Coast only 3 years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. My prayers and thoughts go out to everyone living there. And please, if any of our readers are still in the area where this storm is expected to hit, please leave as soon as possible. Don’t take any chances.
And McCain and Palin are headed to Mississippi to assess the preparations.
Now is not the time to grandstand. I doubt they can do much other than get in the way and waste the time of people who need to be helping with the evacuation and preparing for a disaster. I would say the same thing to Obama and Biden.
…and I do mean fail. Obama tried not to get in the way when he was helping sandbagging efforts during the Mississippi floods, but McCain made himself the issue when he tried to cruise over.
Meanwhile, back in Nawlins, my elderly aunt and cousin Junior in the wheelchair are now in Alexandria out of harms way. So far, they don’t know the whereabouts as yet of cousin Pam and her sons.
I hope they get good news soon.
From the latest NOAA National Hurricane center Advisory as of 11:00 EDT:
New Orleans a ghost town due to Gustav
Hurricane likely to make landfall earlier, and as major Category 4 storm
NBC News and news services
updated 2:05 p.m. CT, Sun., Aug. 31, 2008
(more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26451955/)
NEW ORLEANS – The Big Easy and other Louisiana coastal areas increasingly took on the eeriness of ghost towns Sunday as most residents heeded a mandatory evacuation order, and police and National Guard troops clamped down to prevent the kind of lawlessness and chaos that followed Katrina three years ago.
Col. Mike Edmondson, chief of the Louisiana State Police, said he believed over 90 percent of the coastal Louisiana population had fled — the largest evacuation in state history.
Large areas of southeast Louisiana, including sections in the greater New Orleans area, that are protected by levees face being flooding by several feet of water, according to Gustav surge models. Gustav appears likely to overwhelm the system of levees west of the city that have for decades been under-funded and neglected even as the population has grown.
The Army Corps of Engineers has stockpiled steel pilings, sandbags and metal baskets filled with sand in the event that emergency repairs are needed to fill in breaches. Heavy duty helicopters capable of dropping sandbags are on standby.
The exodus took place as Gustav sped up to a pace that could see it make landfall somewhere along the northern Gulf Coast by Monday morning.
Clouds were already rolling in along the Gulf Coast, and the skies were beginning to darken. Rain could begin falling as early as Sunday night on New Orleans.
Mayor Ray Nagin imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew that was to begin Sunday at sunset, while the last bus carrying residents to safety was to leave at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Nagin also warned that looting — one of the chronic problems after Hurricane Katrina — would not be tolerated. “Looters will go directly to jail. You will not get a pass this time,” he said. “You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You will go directly to the Big House.”
Most were taking him seriously. Stores and restaurants shut down, hotels closed and windows were boarded up. Some who planned to stay changed their mind at the last second, not willing to risk the worst.
“I got scared at the last minute,” said Ollie Hilson, 54, of Marrero, a town on the west bank of the Mississippi River. She was waiting for a bus in a gymnasium where the New Orleans Hornets practice. She had a single plastic grocery bag with a change of clothes and a few personal belongings, and waited with her two nieces and their four children, all under the age of 3. “I was worried about the kids. We just couldn’t stay.”
Gustav had weakened to a Category 3 hurricane while crossing western Cuba on Saturday, but was expected to strengthen later in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
It had also picked up speed on leaving Cuba and was moving northwest at 17 mph with winds of 115 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center’s 2 p.m. ET advisory. The center also warned that Gustav could spawn tornadoes along the coast.
Some hospitals changed plans once Gustav sped up and decided to evacuate patients they had planned to shelter there, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters Sunday before leaving for a command post in Louisiana.
I posted a diary last night with online resources. This has been proving helpful for people to coordinate efforts to aid in evacuation.
There’s also some links provided on the Metblogs Hub site.