Katrina Makes Landfall

Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore early Monday and charged toward the low-lying city of New Orleans with 150-mph winds and the threat of a catastrophic storm surge.

A mandatory evacuation was declared Sunday for the New Orleans area.

"It was exactly the right thing for the mayor and governor to do," Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

Katrina edged slightly to the east shortly before making landfall near Grand Isle, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's wrath might not be directed at the vulnerable city. Martin Nelson, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, said the northern part of the eyewall came ashore at about 5 a.m. central time.

Electrical power at the Superdome failed at 5:02 a.m., triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting and was not strong enough to run the air conditioning. Overall, 370,000 Entergy customers were without power Monday morning as the hurricane made landfall.

Conditions in the city were rapidly deteriorating shortly after landfall, reports CBS News Correspondent Cami McCormick. The winds were blowing the rain sideways, and there was a low rumble, as powerful wind gusts slam into buildings. It sounded at times like a jet engine. Those who remain behind were hunkering down.

"Our people are sturdy people, strong people. We've dealt with storms before," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco told CBS News Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm. "We know we're going to lose some property. There will be extensive damage but we will rebuild. We have confidence in ourselves and know we can restore property we can't restore lives."

President Bush issued rare "advance" emergency declarations for Louisiana and neighboring states, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Peter Maer, and federal agencies were moving relief supplies to areas closer to the storm zone. Thousands of national guard troops are at a staging center in Memphis. A nuclear power plant near New Orleans shut down and the government was monitoring two other facilities.

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.

Hundreds of thousands in the three states heeded official advice Sunday to evacuate, some heading to shelters and others clogging the roads as they tried to reach friends, relatives and motels on higher ground.

"Have God on your side. Definitely have God on your side," Nancy Noble said as she sat with her puppy and three friends in six lanes of one-way traffic on gridlocked Interstate 10 in Louisiana. "It's very frightening."

"I'm really scared," said Linda Young as she filled her gas tank near New Orleans. "I've been through hurricanes, but this one scares me. I think everybody needs to get out."

"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in ordering the mandatory evacuation for his city of 485,000 people, surrounded by suburbs of a million more. "The storm surge will most likely topple our levee system."

"This is very serious, of the highest nature," said Nagin. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."

Conceding that as many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport, the city arranged buses to take people to 10 last-resort shelters, including the Superdome.

First priority in the Superdome went to frail, elderly people on walkers, some with oxygen tanks. They were told to bring enough food, water and medicine to last up to five days.

In the French Quarter, most bars that stayed open through the threat of past hurricanes were boarded up and the few people on the streets were battening down their businesses and getting out.