Georges Takes A Turn To The East
View live coverage of Hurricane Georges from WWL-TV New Orleans, at 11pm EST.
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Hurricane Georges is now expected to hit early Monday morning between Biloxi and Pascagoula, Mississippi. CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather and Correspondents Jim Axelrod, Byron Pitts, and John Roberts are covering the storm from ground zero along the Crescent City and the Mississippi Delta.
After a bruising collision with the Florida Keys, Hurricane Georges gathered force in the Gulf heading toward landfall late on Sunday or early Monday. In the eye of the storm, winds are in excess of 100 mph, a category two hurricane. It could become a category three, at 130 mph, building a crushing deadly storm surge of ocean water, especially dangerous at high tide.
Even as the hurricane was hours away from New Orleans, it is already blamed for one death there. An 86 year-old woman died on a bus taking nursing home patients to a shelter.
The Crescent City is already feeling the storm. Dark clouds have rolled in and wind gusts are in excess of 50 miles-per hour. All of the interstate highways in and out of New Orleans are closed, and people who did not evacuate are either flocking to the Superdome and Convention Center, or battening down the hatches and preparing to ride it out at home. While there is no way of knowing how many people did leave, it is clear that hundreds of thousands of people have evacuated the historic city, which is largely below sea level.
Forecasters predicted Hurricane Georges would begin lashing the Gulf Coast with hurricane force winds Sunday, and more than a million residents have been told to evacuate. Landfall was predicted sometime late Sunday night or early Monday morning, but residents were cautioned that heavy wids would lash the shore well before the eye of the storm crossed over land.
Hurricane warnings were posted along 330 miles of coast from Morgan City, La., to Panama City, Fla. Hurricane watches were posted on the flanks of the warning area east to St. Marks, Fla., and west to Intracoastal City, La.
"This is kind of like looking down the barrel of a shotgun and hoping it turns," said Louisiana State Police Lt. Col. Ronnie Jones. A shift of forty or fifty miles to the West would raise the danger significantly to heavily populated New Orleans.
On Mississippi's Gulf coast, curious residents are ignoring barricades and warning to look at the pounding surf, before conditions get worse. Waterfront homes, some 150 years old, are protected by brightly colored storm shutters intended to challenge the worst of the hurricane.
Georges ripped slowly but furiously through the Caribbean, killing more than 300 people before it smashed into the Florida Keys with winds over 100 mph.
Forecasters said Sunday the storm may strengthen before it makes landfall, pushing tides up to 17 feet above normal.
While New Orleans is protected by 130 miles of levees, city officials worried that Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas could spill over their banks and send flood waters into the city and its suburbs.
President Clinton has declared a state of emergency, making Florida eligible for federal assistance. The hurricane had spared Florida's east coast, including Miami.
In Louisiana and Mississippi, voluntary evacuations of the coast took place on Saturday. New Orleans officials, with part of their city built behind bulwarks that shield below sea-level neighborhoods, were especially vigilant.
Earlier, Alabama Gov. Fob James declared a state of emergency in his state as Hurricane Georges surged toward the northern Gulf Coast.
A mandatory evacuation order was issued for tourists and residents on the Gulf beaches in Baldwin County, a spokesman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency said.
After barreling through the Caribbean and leaving a path of destruction that included at least 300 deaths, Hurricane Georges pounded the Keys Friday with 105 mph winds that sent waves crashing onto streets and knocked out power.
Through much of the necklace of islands on Saturday, lights remained off as line crews struggled to restore "feeder lines" stretching from plants to the north.
Cleared by the evacuations, the normally busy Key West downtown was empty: only a few cars ventured onto Duval Street, usually the hub of tourist activity. Electrical transformers boomed as they blew out.
Property damage was widespread. "The coconuts were like cannonballs blowing in the wind," said Davin Kusik, who lives in a mobile home park on Cudjoe Key. Parts of the chain of islands were expected to be without water and electricity until at least Monday.
The last major hurricane to threaten that area was 1992's ndrew, the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history.