Katrina Makes Landfall

Heads Toward Low-Lying New Orleans With 150 MPH Winds, Many Flee

(CBS/AP)  While gas prices usually peak in August, any major disruption to oil production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico caused by Hurricane Katrina could keep prices high even longer. Gasoline prices could see the largest spikes because so many refineries in the region could be shut down by flooding, power outages, or both, energy analysts said.

Oil hit $70 a barrel over night in anticipation of Katrina. About a million dollars a day of oil production has been shot down, evacuating thousands of workers, reports CBS News Correspondent Susan McGinnis. Chevron, Texaco, BP and Mobil have all brought their workers ashore.

New Orleans is surrounded by water, reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan, with massive Lake Pontchartrain on one side and the Mississippi River on the other, which means New Orleans has virtually no high ground. The downtown sits on a basin with levees on either side. With the storm pushing the waters to the south, the metropolitan crater is likely to fill up like a punch bowl with no place for the water to drain. Emergency officials say just because the city hasn't flooded yet, it doesn't mean it won't flood later when residents least expect it.

If that water comes over the levees, the worry is the pumps will be under water and the only way to get it out would be to open the levees back up and let the water drain out. It could take anywhere between 10 days and two weeks before the water is completely out of the city.

For the first time in its history, New Orleans was under a mandatory evacuation order, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann. The city has never seen a hurricane of this strength hitting it almost directly.

Katrina is so powerful that the same high level of anxiety was being felt all along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from Louisiana to Alabama and the Florida line.

After Katrina comes ashore, it will spread up the eastern part of the country, said CBS News Hurricane Analyst Bryan Norcross of CBS station WFOR.