Most flee New Orleans as hurricane bears down

This time, few willing to face wrath of storm

Residents boarded a train in New Orleans bound for Memphis yesterday, ahead of the expected arrival of Hurricane Gustav today. (Essdras M. Suarez/ Globe Staff)

NEW ORLEANS - With Hurricane Gustav churning just off the coast of Louisiana yesterday, threatening the region with 115-mile-per-hour winds and storm surges capable of topping levees, many New Orleans residents did what they did not do just three years ago for Hurricane Katrina: They left town.

This hurricane-weary city, population roughly 300,000, was all but empty by nightfall with only emergency workers joining a few stubborn souls who refused to head for higher ground. From the city's richest neighborhoods to its most blighted streets, from the French Quarter to low-lying suburban parishes nearby, nearly everyone had heeded urgent calls from Mayor C. Ray Nagin and others to evacuate or potentially face arrest.

"I don't want to be revolving in the wind over the city like Dorothy in the 'Wizard of Oz,' " said Joe Sacco, a 71-year-old hotel worker who lived for a while in Cleveland, Tenn., after Katrina's wrath in 2005. "I think we're going back to Cleveland. I can't take all this stress and inconvenience anymore."

As of late last night, Gustav appeared to have lost some of its ferocity but remained a Category 3 storm, potentially packing 10- to 14-foot storm surges that could top levees and floodwalls. Just as worrisome, authorities said yesterday, was the potential for the storm to stall over land, dumping buckets of rain. And because the US Army Corps of Engineers is still at least three years away from completing upgrades to the flood protection system, authorities continued to have reason to be concerned.

"There are many variables. I'm not going to sit here and guarantee you we're not going to have flooding in the system. We're talking about 15 inches of rain," said Colonel Alvin Lee, district commander of the New Orleans Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers. "We're very confident the system is stronger than we were before Hurricane Katrina. But what I want everyone to understand is that we're not there yet."

The hurricane was projected to hit west of the city, creating a storm surge in its upper-right quadrant that threatens the fragile levees in a part of New Orleans that held fast during Katrina.

Gustav comes almost three years to the day that Katrina smacked the Louisiana and Mississippi coast, punching holes in New Orleans's floodwalls and levees, and ultimately flooding about 80 percent of the city.

Even now, Katrina water lines linger like dirt-brown scars on some homes and city buildings. At least 150,000 people never returned to live here, cutting the population of this beloved American destination by at least a third. And the neighborhoods hardest hit by the floodwaters are still struggling. According to one recent study, 85 percent of residences in the city's Lower Ninth Ward remain vacant.

But there's no denying that Louisiana has learned - and put into effect - bitter lessons drawn from the calamitous response to Katrina.

Three years ago, some New Orleans hospitals were paralyzed when their basement-level generators succumbed to flood waters, severing power that kept breathing machines and other vital medical gear working. Since then, medical centers such as Tulane Hospital have moved their generators to higher ground and sheathed them in protective walls.

At the same time, hospitals have restricted who can use their lobbies as shelters of last resort. During Katrina, marooned hospitals not only had to worry about gravely ill patients - but also clutches of families, some with pets in tow. "Just like the city is trying to restrict who stays, the hospital is trying to have the right number here, but not an excess number," said Dr. Lee Hamm, executive vice dean of the Tulane School of Medicine. That translated yesterday into 60 doctors and about 80 patients.

Even before it hit, Gustav claimed its first victims as officials said there were unconfirmed reports that three critically ill patients died while being evacuated from Louisiana hospitals.

The serpentine levee system designed to protect the region from flooding has also been shored up, with sturdier clay replacing porous sand in some spots. In other stretches of the protective network, walls are higher than they were before Katrina. And where water once freely flowed into the city's canals, leading to breaches in 2005, there are now protective gates to stop a potential storm surge.

Still, broad swaths of the levee system remain much as they were before Katrina struck. It was only in April that a $700 million contract was awarded to fix the canal that so disastrously failed three years ago, obliterating much of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood.

Officials said this time another major source of concern is flooding to the West Bank neighborhood of New Orleans. "The bottom line is that what Katrina and [Hurricane] Rita didn't destroy in 2005, this storm has the potential to do," Ivor van Heerden, a coastal geologist, told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

Knowing all too well the dangers, this time around people heeded warnings to leave and got out. It was possible yesterday to travel block after block in the city - residential and commercial, quaint and gritty - and not see a single person, save for police officers and National Guard troops, who patrolled the city, 3,100 strong, throughout the night.

Some evacuees clambered aboard buses and trains at the Union Passenger Terminal, not far from the Superdome, the colossus that came to symbolize the failed response to Katrina. In that stadium, thousands of New Orleanians sat stranded for days amid stifling heat and stinking toilets.

Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes, spiritual leader of the region's Roman Catholics, noted how different the response was to Gustav as he blessed the diaspora at the transit terminal.

"I prayed that God would bless them on the journey to their destination, keep them healthy, and return them to us both safely and quickly," said Hughes, who was stationed years ago at parishes in Framingham and Newton.

Angela Hubbard, a French Quarter waitress, stood on a street corner, awaiting a bus that would take her to the train station. She weathered Katrina in Mid-City and ultimately had to swim out. Not this time. "I don't want to experience that again. It was horrible," said Hubbard, cradling 11-month-old Chad in the 90-degree heat.

She was heading north - somewhere north. Where, it didn't matter. "As long as we're safe," she said.

Amin Askar presided over one of the few gas stations still open in the city at midday, the Shell on Tulane Avenue. With a wink, he even promised to leave the pumps on - for credit card users - when he closed up the rest of the station.

Askar, who moved to New Orleans from Israel when he was 16, said he was bound for Texas - "Houston, I think" - to reunite with his wife and five children, ages 4 to 17. But their stay, he said, would be brief. New Orleans beckons, as it always has.

"Once, I went to move to Florida. I stayed one week," said Askar, 43, wearing several days' worth of beard. "I went to New York. I didn't like the subway. I keep coming back."

According to Jerry Sneed, the city's director of homeland security and emergency preparedness, authorities shipped 18,000 people from New Orleans via bus, train, and plane in the past two days. "We have done something that no other city in the country has ever done before," Sneed said. "We have literally evacuated - I hope - our entire population."

Well, maybe not entirely. While an estimated 2 million residents of south Louisiana have fled Gustav, which Nagin dubbed "the mother of all storms," some New Orleanians have decided to stay.

Todd Windisch and his wife, Erin Peacock, hunkered down at their home in Mid-City. Peacock, a 34-year-old salon owner, said the mayor's comments made her anxious at first. But she got over it, she said from a kitchen stocked to the ceiling with Pringles, strawberry Pop-Tarts, canned beans and boiled peanuts, and plenty of other supplies.

"We've got 60 gallons of gas," Windisch said. "We've got plenty of food, plenty of booze."

And three guns, he added, just in case.