NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 1, 2008
Gustav Churns Toward Empty New Orleans
Record 1.9 Million People Flee Louisiana's Coast; Cat-3 Hurricane Set For Midday Landfall
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Members of the National Guard patrol the area along Bourbon Street in New Orleans, La., on Aug. 31, 2008. Hurricane Gustav is expected to hit the area Monday. (AP PHOTO)
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Department of Veterans Affairs emergency personnel remove hospital patients from a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport airplane who are being evacuated from the Gulf Coast because of Hurricane Gustav at Little Rock National Airport in Little Rock, Ark., Aug. 31, 2008. (AP/Jeff Bowen V.A.-Little Rock)
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Satellite Image of Hurricane Gustav, August 31, 2008. (NOAA)
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Louisiana State Police Troop D, Lake Charles Commander, Capt. Mike Leonards discusses a contraflow plan for the established evacuation routes during a Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008, briefing on Hurricane Gustav at the Lake Charles, La. Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Director Dick Gremillion looks on. (AP/Karen E. Wink, American Press)
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Erica Carrillo, left, and her cousin, Katherine Carrillo, cuddle together in their cot at the LSU-Shreveport shelter, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008 in Shreveport, La. (AP/H. Wildsmith, Shreveport Times)
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New Orleans Waits For Gustav
Hurricane Gustav is continuing to grow rapidly in strength as the storm has been deemed Category 4 status. Hari Sreenivasan reports from New Orleans, as residents prepare for another evacuation.
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Gustav: Another Katrina?
Russ Mitchell speaks with "The Early Show" weatherman Dave Price about the impending Category 4 storm Gustav, which will soon strike portions of the South, including New Orleans.
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Gustav Follows Katrina's Path
On the third Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's decent onto New Orleans, La. the city preps for a tropical storm that is eerily similar to Katrina. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
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Gathering Gustav
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The storm was set to crash ashore midday Monday with frightful force, testing the three years of planning and rebuilding that followed Katrina's devastating blow to the Gulf Coast.
Painfully aware of the failings that led to that horrific suffering and more than 1,600 deaths, this time officials moved beyond merely insisting tourists and residents leave south Louisiana. They threatened arrest, loaded thousands onto buses and warned that anyone who remained behind would not be rescued.
Forecasters said Gustav was likely to grow stronger as it marched toward the coast with top sustained winds of around 115 mph. At 2 a.m. Central on Monday, the National Hurricane Center said Gustav was a Category 3 storm centered about 170 miles south-southeast of New Orleans, moving northwest near 16 mph. The storm's center was forecast to come ashore at midday Monday.
The city so famous for its sounds was eerily quiet Sunday tonight, CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan reported. The streets were mostly empty except for National Guard troops and police on patrol.
There were roadblocks throughout the Big Easy, Sreenivasan reported, to make sure looters don't take advantage of the emptiness, unlike in the days after hurricane Katrina. Mayor Ray Nagin said looters would get a one-way ticket to one of the toughest prisons in the country.
"Looters will go directly to jail. You will not get a pass this time," Mayor Ray Nagin said. "You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You will go directly to the Big House."
In addition to his admonition against looting, Nagin expressed some hope that since Gustav has shown to be a fast-moving storm, it might make landfall before gaining even more strength over the Gulf, and would not linger long to dump even more rain on the area.
Col. Mike Edmondson, state police commander, said he believed that 90 percent of the population had fled the Louisiana coast. The exodus of 1.9 million people is the largest evacuation in state history, and thousands more had left from Mississippi, Alabama and flood-prone southeast Texas.
Click here for more about CBS News' complete coverage of Hurricane Gustav.
Late Sunday, Gov. Bobby Jindal issued one last plea to the roughly 100,000 people still left on the coast: "If you've not evacuated, please do so. There are still a few hours left."
Louisiana and Mississippi temporarily changed traffic flow so all highway lanes led away from the coast, and cars were packed bumper-to-bumper. 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 was trying to get situated at home. I was trying to get things so it would be halfway safe," said 46-year-old painter Jerry Williams, who showed up at the city's Union Station to catch one of the last buses out of town. "You're torn. Do you leave it and worry about it, or do you stay and worry about living?"
(AP/Therese Apel, The Daily Leader)
Against all warnings, some gambled and decided to face its wrath. On an otherwise deserted commercial block of downtown Lafayette, about 135 miles west of the city, Tim Schooler removed the awnings from his photography studio. He thought about evacuating Sunday before deciding he was better off riding out the storm at home with his wife, Nona.
"There's really no place to go. All the hotels are booked up to Little Rock and beyond," he said. "We're just hoping for the best."
With a house sitting a few hundred yards from a levee that failed during Katrina, Jimmy Krummel hightailed it to safety before floodwaters filled his home. But despite all of the warnings, CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reports, Krummel is not evacuating this time.
"I'm more confident on this side of the canal after the Army Corps has done all their testing and rebuilding," Krummel said. But he's the exception. The vast majority of city residents were unwilling to risk another catastrophe.
"I just don't know that we had enough time to fix the levies like they should have been originally," said Susan Winters.
There were frightening comparisons between Gustav and Katrina, which flooded 80 percent of New Orleans when the storm surge overtook the levees. While Gustav isn't as large as Katrina, which was a massive Category 5 storm at roughly the same place in the Gulf, there was no doubt the storm posed a major threat to a partially rebuilt New Orleans and the flood-prone coasts of Louisiana and southeast Texas. The storm has already killed at least 94 people on its path through the Caribbean.
The storm could bring with it a storm surge of up to 14 feet and rainfall up to 20 inches wherever it hits. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina pushed about 25 feet of surge.
Houma, Louisiana could be in line for a direct hit from Gustav, CBS Early Show Weather anchor Dave Price reported. Throughout the area, hospitals airlifted patients out and there was a steady stream of traffic northward to safety.
A direct hit in Houma could push upwards of 15 feet of water from the Teribone Bay directly into the parish, Price reported.
After Katrina, officials from the parish to the federal levels are not waiting to act. Mandatory evacuations started yesterday and are still ongoing. Homeland Security here told CBS News that at least 80 percent of the parish had gone, but exact numbers were hard to come by.
Mindful of the potential for disaster, John McCain tore up the script Sunday for the opening day of his Republican National Convention, ordering the cancellation of all but essential activities for Monday as Gustav churned toward New Orleans.
Surge models suggest larger areas of southeast Louisiana, including parts of the greater New Orleans area, could be flooded by several feet of water. Gustav appears most likely to overwhelm the levees west of the city that have for decades been underfunded and neglected and are years from an update.
The nation's economic attention was focused on Gustav's effect on refineries and offshore petroleum production rigs. The combination of prolonged production interruptions, such as occurred when Katrina and Rita damaged the Gulf infrastructure, could trigger rising prices.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Chevron Corp. decided not to close its Pascagoula refinery, which processes 330,000 barrels of oil a day.
Billions of dollars were at stake in other wide-ranging economic sectors, including sugar harvesting, the shipping business and tourism. The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered a dozen casinos to close.
The final train out of town left with fewer than 100 people on board, while the one of the last buses to make the rounds of the city pulled into Union Station empty. By 7 p.m., police were making their final rounds. Every officer in the department was on duty, and 1,200 on street were joined by 1,500 National Guardsmen.
"When the 911 calls start coming in, we'll know how many people are left in town," said police superintendent Warren Riley.
Even as they pressed to complete the evacuation, officials insisted there would be no repeat of the inept response to Katrina's wrath. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said search and rescue will be the top priority once Gustav passes - high-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room are posted around the strike zone.
West of New Orleans in Houma, he wished passengers well as stragglers boarded buses for Shreveport and Dallas.
"It's going to be hot on some of the buses. It's going to be a long trip," Chertoff said. "So it's not going to be pleasant, but it's a lot better than sitting in the Superdome and it's a lot better than sitting in your house."
Texas Evacuations
State officials have helped evacuate and shelter nearly 10,000 people with special needs from southeast Texas in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav.
Texas was also readying to take in an estimated 45,000 evacuees from Louisiana.
So far, three Texas counties have issued mandatory evacuations. They are Hardin, Jefferson and Orange and include the cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur.
State personnel and resources also have been used to help the evacuation of some 1,000 Louisiana residents with health issues. The governor's office says 27 buses carrying Louisiana residents who could not evacuate themselves are on their way to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Transportation Troubles
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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See all 69 Comments----------------
Still in FEMA trailers? Gimme a break.
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Still in FEMA trailers? Gimme a break.
Posted by aggiekat2004 at 06:30 PM : Aug 31, 2008
People living in FEMA cardboard boxes were urged to move to the northeast corner of the box.
"nigs???"
I think I can reasonably count on the fact that you are one of those Right Wing Extremist bigots who will not be voting for Obama specifically because of race.
Good! Stick with those rednecks in the GOP. The Left doesn''t need or want bigots like you.
I will not eat up your lies or consume your persuasions,
I will not stand still in a media jungle of non-information,
I will not surrender to a mass media invented reality,
I will not obey a limited freedom of speech. your so called liberties are a spit in the face,
Posted by mcdazz
And what was your contribution to the people of New Orleans during and after Katrina. The mayor of New Orleans and the governor of LA bear direct responsibility for handling Katrina so poorly. This is why we have state and local governments. Finally, are the taxpayers going to rebuild New Orleans each time there is a hurricane? Perhaps, it is time to desert New Orleans and build elsewhere.
No, that many people live in Southern Louisiana. I don''t think New Orleans takes up the whole southern part of Louisiana.
Yeah, there''s a lot of stupid people out there. But I guess if they think their "stuff" is more important than their LIVES, what can you do?
Given most the high ground is allready used it would not be there. And with the cost of construction your not going to see $200 a month rents unless they build 10''s of thousands of cracker boxes and Diddy dont want people ripping out the plumbing and wire to sell to scrap yards. You have to understand what your working with there. It only cost 185 million to fix the super dome and people wonder why this time its pad locked.
No more chock-lit city free passes for criminals who prey on innocent citizens? That hardly seems fair.
So much for the purple Catalac Escalade, eh?:)
I''m not worried about the levees because apparently they always had the technology to make them able to withstand Katrina, they just never thought it was necessary - after the damage and the failure of FEMA the last time, how is there any way they wouldn''t overdesign it to withstand like a category 10 or whatever (?)
They didn''t make them bigger and better, they just REPAIRED them.
I''m sure he''s already commandeered the best hotel suites for his use - living like a drub baron.
Posted by erasmus81
Oh wow, I just looked into it and Shrub''s a pig - the old levee was designed to withstand a category 4 and Katrina was a category 4. The levee failed because it apparently had design flaws that at least one analyst predicted would be fatal.
So when asked whether they would repair and retrofit the old one to withstand a category 5 Shrub ducked the question.
Thankfully this hurricane''s a category 3, but wow if it was a category 4 and the levee designed to withstand a category 4 didn''t hold up as promised then wow, yeah that''d be REALLY nervewracking.
It should be okay though for Gustav so long as Halliburton wasn''t in charge of the repairs :o
It''s a category 3 right now, but aren''t they saying it could get stronger once it passes over the warmer water on the way there?
Posted by SamTheTVCat at 01:16 AM : Sep 01, 2008"
I don''t know where you are getting your information, but the old levees were designed to withstand a category 3 storm, not a category 4.
If you are going to research something, do it properly.
"We''ll show ''em, this time!" runs the feeling at the agency.
Unfortunately, missing in action is an explanation for the recent discovery FEMA "surplused" several million dollars in blankets and other survival supplies in the last few months.
A FEMA official, asked for an explanation of why the equipment was believed no longer needed, could say only that was a determination made by somebody else.
Apparently, FEMA takes lessons in profligacy from its larger sibling, Department of Homeland Security, aka The Inept Behemoth.
FEMA is active, of course, but to what extent? To judge from only the AP story, FEMA does not exist.
Curiously, the AP reporter "wrote around" this salient omission of FEMA activity.
Posted by DemWatcher
Posted by erasmus81
I don''t think this is the appropriate time for you two to be trying to prove yourself to people, do you?
Because Katrina was category 3 so the larger point was that the levees were a failed design not an inadequate design, and the levees are far from safe.
Maybe it would be more useful to pray for others rather than try and find facts so that you can say you''re better informed than somebody else? Because you seem to be talking more about me and my facts than the people in harms way :o
Peace.
omg Mr. Krummel probably thought it was designed for a category 4 like me . . . I hope his confidence isn''t misplaced!!!!! :(
You were the one spewing out the facts. The WRONG facts. We were just correcting those WRONG facts by giving the RIGHT facts. Isn''t it better for people to have the RIGHT facts, rather than the WRONG facts?:)
PEACE
Posted by erasmus81
I guess if you hate imperfection then that''s that - just know that nobody''s ever going to be up to your standards except you . . .
I think you are a little bit of a whackjob. All I was doing was letting you know that the hurricane might not remain a category 3 and I was giving you the information that I found. I thought I was doing you a favor by letting you know. In reality though, you must be pretty d-amn stupid because if you had been reading any of the articles on this website over the past couple of days, you would have known all this. If you haven''t read anything then you shouldn''t have been posting any facts at all! What do you do? Make it up as you go along?
Have a nice evening . . .
And like last time, it won''t matter if any of the platforms or refineries see any major damage....the new high price should be good for the next 9 months.
Same thing a pusher does to any addict. Kick the habit or pay the price.
I wonder if they''ll call the white folks "scavengers" again and the black folks "looters".
I wonder if all those dependent slug still to lazy to move out of FEMA huts will wish they had lent a hand in rebuilding the levees instead of watching soaps and collecting government checks. The good news for these folks is that IF Obama gets elected their "sit on your *** checks" will be about 3 times larger!....and Obama promised he will put an end to hurricanes! (one of his more believable promises, actually)
Thank you for reminding me how evil some of my fellow Americans are. Wow. Next time you look into the mirror, kiss yourself since you are the perfect person.
When will this country learn? I don''t know.
All warnings in hurricane-prone areas should be the same. If you stay, you pay the price. If you can''t afford to leave, you shouldn''t be living there in the first place. So, LEAVE and GET OUT OF HARMS WAY!
This is serious business. I think people got the message this time. I hope so. Best to everyone in Gustav''s path. Thoughts and prayers are with you.
being welcome, for Gustav to hit land with
a cat 2 force, drop an inch of rain,
blow over a cop, turn into a tropical AND
GOP depression then turn into a warm summer
breeze and head back out into the atlantic
there-by not only f-ing up the RNC convention
but also their effort to use the plight of
the area for a propaganda boost?
It''s just been announce that Gustav WONT
REACH CAT 4,, and with hours to go who knows?
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