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Gustav slams better-prepared Gulf

New Orleans residents stay away as city watches levees

By Audrey Hudson (Contact) | Tuesday, September 2, 2008

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A mighty hurricane slammed into Louisiana's Gulf Coast on Monday but this time was greeted with a response well-versed in the lessons of Katrina.

New Orleans was virtually vacant when Hurricane Gustav arrived, its residents heeding warnings less than two days earlier to escape inland.

The city's partially rebuilt and strengthened levees managed to rebuff the initial assault of tropical storm winds and an onslaught of waves overflowing levee walls.

And this time, President Bush was on the scene with his blue shirt-sleeves rolled up, commanding the relief efforts with a gritty determination to put behind him the botched hurricane response of three years ago.

"The coordination on this storm is a lot better," Mr. Bush said at midday, as cautiously optimistic federal and local officials kept a watchful eye to see whether the Gulf Coast's flood-control system would hold through Tuesday.

"It was clearly a spirit of sharing assets, of listening to somebody's problems and saying, 'How can we best address them?'" Mr. Bush said.

Optimism was growing late Monday that New Orleans would soon reopen for business. Mayor C. Ray Nagin cautioned that Tuesday would be too early for residents to return to a city largely in the dark, but their homecoming was "only days away, not weeks."

"I was hoping that this would happen, that we would be able to stand before America, before everyone, and say that we had some success with the levee system. I feel really good about it," he said.

The fury, chaos and desperation that played out on national television three years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was absent across the Gulf region as the brunt of Gustav veered west of New Orleans, targeting instead the heart of Louisiana's well-prepared oil and fishing industries.

The storm weakened to a Category 2 hurricane as it made landfall about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans about 11 a.m. EST. Officials breathed sighs of relief as the water crests did not top most levees by late Monday. Gustav was downgraded to a tropical storm over central Louisiana late Monday night.