Gustav slams better-prepared Gulf

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.

However, relief that a major hurricane had weakened as it approached landfall and just missed New Orleans also was the first-day reaction three years ago, only for the catastrophe to happen the next day when the levees broke.

With the rains stopping and the winds calming, utility repair trucks and search-and-rescue helicopters started their operations before sunset. Red Cross vans were spotted pouring into Louisiana from Mississippi. Power company trucks gathered in wait at truck stops along Interstate 20 as rain continued to pour Monday night. Hotels along the corridor leading to Mississippi were packed, and recreational vehicles spilled out and lined the roads of parks that were full of evacuees.

Concerns instantly turned to flooding in eastern Texas, where the storm was expected to deliver up to 20 inches of rain in the next 24 hours. Another hurricane threat developed in the Caribbean, with Hanna on a course to strike Georgia and the Carolinas in just a few days.

Far away from Gustav’s fury in Minnesota, Republicans pared back their national convention for a day as presumptive presidential nominee John McCain and the delegates focused instead on raising money and arranging humanitarian aid for the victims of Gustav.

It was a theme that first lady Laura Bush and first-lady-hopeful Cindy McCain picked up early Monday evening.

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