With Gustav approaching hurricane strength and showing no signs of veering off a track to slam into the Gulf Coast, authorities across the region began laying the groundwork Thursday to get the sick, elderly and poor away from the shoreline.
The first batch of 700 buses that could ferry residents inland were being sent to a staging area near New Orleans, and officials in Mississippi were trying to decide when to move Katrina-battered residents along the coast who were still living in temporary homes, including trailers vulnerable to high wind.
The planning for a potential evacuation is part of a massive outline drafted after Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore three years ago, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and stranding thousands who couldn't get out in time. As the region prepared to mark the storm's anniversary Friday, officials expressed confidence those blueprints made them ready for Gustav.
"There are a lot of things that are different between now and what we faced in 2005 when Katrina came ashore," said U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was flying to Louisiana to meet with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Bobby Jindal. "We've had three years to put together a plan that never existed before."
With Gustav still several days away, authorities cautioned that no plans were set in stone, and had not yet called for residents to leave. Projections showed the storm arriving early next week as a Category 3 storm, with winds of 111 mph or greater, anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to eastern Texas. But forecasts are extremely tentative several days out, and the storm could change course and strength.
At a news conference Thursday, Nagin said an evacuation order was likely in the coming days, but he didn't expect officials to tell people to leave before Saturday.
Should officials order an evacuation, police and firefighters will drive through neighborhoods, with bull horns, to alert residents. City officials have said they won't force people to leave but those who stay will be assuming all risks and responsibilities for their families.
In a conference call between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local officials, Harvey Johnson, FEMA's deputy administrator, cautioned that officials needed to stick to protocols as the storm unfolded.
"It's very, very important that we play the way we practiced and trained over the last year and a half," he said. "There's a way that we operate. There's a chain of command. There's a way that we interact with each other. And we can't afford to be in a disorganized way as we confront the challenges that we're going to see here."
Governors in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas pre-declared states of emergency in an attempt to build a foundation for federal assistance. Federal officials said resources and personnel to provide post-storm aid were pouring into the Gulf Coast states from other parts of the country Thursday.
Red Cross gets ready
The American Red Cross was checking on shelters, deploying dozens of emergency vehicles or “feeding trucks,” and shipping supplies of cots, blankets and hygiene kits into the region.
Louisiana's corrections department started moving 9,000 inmates away from coastal areas and into lockups further north, Jindal said at a news conference.
Batteries, bottled water, and other storm supplies were selling briskly. Roughly 3,000 National Guard troops were on standby in Louisiana, and another 5,000 were readying in Texas. Hotels in the region reported being booked solid by coastal residents planning ahead.
“We’re almost sold out,” said Sheila Harris, the administrative assistant at the Comfort Inn in Tupelo, Miss, which is about 300 miles inland from the Mississippi coast. She said most of the 83 rooms at the hotel had been booked by New Orleans and southern Mississippi residents.
Many residents found themselves repeating the same things they did in the days before Katrina. The New Orleans Saints were set to play the Miami Dolphins in the team’s final NFL preseason game Thursday night; the Saints played their final game of the 2005 preseason just three days before Katrina. Running back Deuce McAllister, who was planning to shore up his suburban home, found it a little weird to be preparing for a possible storm again.
“It’s out of our hands,” said McAllister. “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
Amid all the preparations, the city still planned to recognize the anniversary. New Orleans planned to hold a “symbolic” burial service for unidentified Katrina victims and a bell-ringing to mark that storm’s three-year anniversary Friday but canceled the jazz funeral that had been planned to precede the service and a candlelight vigil at Jackson Square.
If a Category 3 or stronger hurricane threatens, New Orleans plans to institute a mandatory evacuation order. Depending on the churn of this system, the call could come with a slow-moving Category 2, the city’s emergency preparedness director, Jerry Sneed, said.
Nagin said in interviews Wednesday that the clock on an evacuation would start three days, or 72 hours, from an anticipated landfall.
No Superdome shelter
Unlike Katrina, there will be no massive shelter at the Superdome, a plan designed to encourage residents to leave.
Residents who need help — the elderly, disabled, those without their own transportation — would be moved out by buses, bound for shelters in other Louisiana cities such as Alexandria, Shreveport and Monroe, and Amtrak trains headed to Jackson, Miss., officials have said. Others are expected to leave on their own by vehicle.
The city said it is prepared to move 30,000 residents; estimates put the city’s current population between 310,000 to 340,000 people. There were about 454,000 here before Katrina hit.
Melissa Clark, who lives in neighboring Jefferson Parish, said she’s leaving Friday with her family to stay with friends in Clinton, Miss. — evacuation order or not. Her husband, who works in maintenance at a nearby hospital, will stay behind.
“I’m not taking any chances this time,” the 35-year-old mother of three teenagers said as she waited fifth in line at a Wal-Mart gas station Thursday.
Though officials urged residents to prepare by securing their homes, finding valuables and locating personal documents, some were taking a wait-and-see attitude. In Alabama, many tourists and residents were taking a wait-and-see attitude.
“We plan to sit in a bar and watch the whole thing,” joked Greg Lee, a tourist from Clarksville, Tenn. He was grocery shopping with family members, stocking up on cold beverages and planning to stay through the holiday at their beach house at Fort Morgan, down a beach road from Gulf Shores.
Hurricane-seasoned officials also were hoping for the chance forecasts were wrong. Joey Durel, president of Lafayette’s city and parish governments, said officials in that south-central Louisiana community may begin handing out sandbags to residents as early as Friday — but hoped they wouldn’t need them.
“We’re glad to see we’re in the (forecast) path because they never get it right this far out,” Durel said. “I say that slightly tongue in cheek, but it’s true.”
'Everybody learned a lesson'
Steve Weaver, 82, and his wife stayed for Katrina — and were plucked off the roof of their house by a Coast Guard helicopter. This time, Weaver has no inclination to ride out the storm.
"Everybody learned a lesson about staying, so the highways will be twice as packed this time," Weaver said.
Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, its storm surge blasting through the levees that protect the city. Eighty percent of the city was flooded. After the destruction, many people never returned, and the city's population, around 310,000 people, is roughly two-thirds what it was before the storm, though estimates vary wildly.
The Army Corps of Engineers has since spent billions of dollars to improve the levee system, but because of two quiet hurricane seasons, the flood walls have never been tested. Floodgates have been installed on drainage canals to stop any storm surge from entering the city, and levees have been raised and strengthened with concrete in many places.
Robert Turner Jr., the regional levee director, said the levee system can handle a storm with the likelihood of occurring every 30 years, what the corps calls a 30-year storm. By comparison, Katrina was a 396-year storm.
Still, though pockets of New Orleans are well on the way to recovery, many neighborhoods have struggled to recover. Many residents still live in temporary trailers, and shuttered homes still bear the 'X' that was painted to help rescue teams looking for the dead.
Scientists cautioned that the storm's track and intensity were difficult to predict days in advance.
But in southern Louisiana, there was little else to do except prepare as if it were Katrina.
"I'm panicking," said Evelyn Fuselier of Chalmette, whose home was submerged in 14 feet of floodwater when Katrina hit. Fuselier said she's been back home only a year and nervously watched as Gustav swirled toward the Gulf of Mexico. "I keep thinking, 'Did the Corps fix the levees?,' 'Is my house going to flood again?' ... 'Am I going to have to go through all this again?'"
'Couldn't sleep'
In Grand Isle, tractor loads of dirt and mud were being hauled in to fill portions of the levee system damaged by Katrina, said Grand Isle Mayor David Camardelle. The coastal community south of New Orleans historically is one of the first to evacuate when tropical weather threatens.
"I couldn't sleep last night," Camardelle said. "We just came back from so much."
Emergency preparations also were under way along Mississippi's coast. The eye of Hurricane Katrina pushed ashore near the small towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Miss., and along the 70-mile coastline, roughly 65,000 homes were destroyed and thousands of businesses and casino barges were wiped out. Up to 5,000 temporary housing units are still in use, and emergency officials say the agency could decide as early as Thursday whether residents of those temporary homes should evacuate.
Meanwhile, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said state agencies were keeping a close watch on Gustav as he urged his state's Gulf coast residents to review personal emergency plans and enter storm-preparation mode.
