By Rick Jervis, Marisol Bello and Andrea Stone
USA TODAY
 AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard This aerial photo shows flooding from Hurricane Gustav in eastern New Orleans Monday. Gustav has weakened significantly as 1.9 million evacuees prepare to return home later this week. |
NEW ORLEANS — The mayor called it “the mother of all storms.” Ray Nagin even warned it could be “worse than a Katrina.”
Hurricane Gustav may not have lived up to its billing, sidestepping New Orleans to come ashore in Louisiana’s oil patch as a weaker-than-expected storm with winds of up to 110 mph. But Gustav — and the frantic response to it by government officials and local residents — made it clear how Hurricane Katrina’s legacy is a newfound respect for nature and continuing anxiety over whether the levees designed to keep New Orleans from flooding will do their jobs.
Nearly 2 million people fled the Louisiana coast over the weekend, many heeding mandatory-evacuation orders by Nagin and other officials. New Orleans became a ghost town, a city under curfew where police and National Guard troops searched for looters. A mere 10,000 people in New Orleans were believed to have stayed put to ride out the storm. That was well below the numbers who remained in the city three years ago, when more than 25,000 alone camped out in the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. Thousands more were stranded in homes, hospitals, public buildings and freeway overpasses.
Katrina carried winds of up to 130 mph at landfall and packed a 27-foot storm surge; about 80% of New Orleans was flooded after levees and sea walls yielded to rising water. More than 1,600 died along the Gulf Coast. As Gustav approached, it was clear that memories of Katrina were washing away complacency in communities from Texas to Alabama.
Janet Johnson rode out Katrina in her home in Thibodaux, but this time she listened to family and friends who pleaded that she flee.
“They were telling us to get out, leave now,” said Johnson, 56, whose 13-member family endured a 14-hour ride on a chartered bus without air conditioning to take refuge in a shelter in Fort Worth. “That really upset my stomach, and it got me to thinking I’d best leave.”
Because of Katrina, many longtime residents saw Gustav differently than they might have viewed big storms before 2005. In the past, “You wouldn’t get nervous until the last minute,” said Monique McCoy, manager of the Maskarade mask store in the French Quarter. “This time, I think people are a little more nervous earlier because they’re still not sure about the levee system.”
An unprecedented evacuation
In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita prompted 1.4 million residents to evacuate, said Christina Stephens of the Louisiana Recovery Agency. This time, 1.9 million people fled. Three years ago, only southwestern Louisiana residents evacuated. This time, residents all along the Gulf Coast headed north.
“That had never been done before,” Stephens said.
Unlike three years ago, there was no “shelter of last resort” to lull New Orleanians without cars or the means to escape into staying. Memories of horrendous conditions at the Superdome appeared to convince residents to get out of town this time.
This time, they got plenty of help. State and federal agencies sent buses, boats, planes and helicopters to evacuate those without cars, the homebound, the sick and the stragglers. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said 9,000 people were medically evacuated ahead of Gustav, including 8,000 from nursing homes.
Despite “a few diehards” who insisted on riding out the hurricane, Fire Chief Freddy Guidry of Lafourche Parish District 3 said more people left “than with any storm I’ve ever seen. It seems like Katrina did teach us a lesson.”
Despite the positive response from residents fearing a Katrina redux, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned Monday it was “way too early” for those who fled southern Louisiana to return home. Nagin urged people to “resist the temptation to say we’re out of the woods.”
The cautionary pleas sounded a different note than three years ago. Then, New Orleans breathed a sigh of relief as Katrina moved past the city — and then saw catastrophe strike when the city’s levees burst hours later.
“I don’t want anybody to have a false sense of hope,” Jindal said Monday afternoon.
Yet long before Gustav hit land, federal, state and local officials were ready in a way they weren’t in 2005.
The National Guard mobilized about 7,000 troops for Gustav, and an additional 4,000 were scheduled to arrive today. It called up roughly 5,500 for Katrina, said Capt. Taysha Deaton Gibbs, a National Guard spokeswoman. “We operated quicker, we had our troops pre-positioned earlier,” she said. “These were lessons learned from Katrina.”
New Orleans police also prepared differently. The entire force worked through Gustav, with teams of officers set up at five “safe houses” around the city to prevent the widespread looting that followed Katrina. Unmarked police cruisers patrolled neighborhoods, weaving around downed trees and power lines even before Gustav’s heaviest winds died down.
“We looked at what caused trouble during Katrina and how we can correct it,” Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell said. “And everything was in place.”
The state set up centers to share information and a telephone hotline to answer questions about everything from evacuation routes to emergency medical care.
That was a lesson from Katrina, when all radio communication went dead for three days and rumors of thousands of deaths ran wild when information was cut off with rural parishes in southern Louisiana, said State Police Col. Mike Edmonson. This year, Louisiana spent $40 million to update radio communications.
When Mark Cooper began work in January as director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, his top priority was to repair the state’s relationship with first responders in Louisiana’s 64 parishes. Katrina caused them to lose faith with officials in Baton Rouge.
He and the state police superintendent met with every police chief, sheriff and emergency manager to figure out how to do things better.
“I know that if we did not have those relationships when disaster hit, there would just be more issues to deal with,” he said as Gustav rumbled across the state.
He was right. When the state’s bus contractor couldn’t come through with 700 buses needed for the Gustav evacuation, “we had to scramble,” he said. But the planning paid off. Officials switched to a backup plan to use buses from local school districts, driven by National Guard troops.
More ‘teamwork’
On the federal level, FEMA worked with state emergency managers ahead of time to estimate how many people would need be moved away from the coast, how they would be transported and where they would go. “None of that was in place three years ago,” said FEMA’s Mike Hall, referring to when FEMA and the Bush administration were criticized for their slow response to the Katrina crisis.
Said Edmonson: “The things we were literally doing in the days and weeks after Katrina we are doing in the days before” storms now.
He cited evacuations as an example. The state worked ahead of time with local parishes to determine pickup points throughout the region and worked out how to get evacuees on buses, trains and planes. From there, the state, FEMA and the Red Cross determined where shelters would be set up and how to make sure those shelters would have enough cots, food and blankets.
“There’s been a teamwork that we did not see after Katrina when it was so chaotic,” he said.
FEMA said it assembled 2,000 contractors to register evacuees in about 340 shelters in 10 states. It said 45,000 people had given refuge just before Gustav hit compared with 35,000 during the first night of Katrina.
In Fort Worth, Mayor Mike Moncrief said about 570 people were in shelters there and that so much food and clothing has been donated that he asked residents to stop bringing more.
“Things are going smoothly,” Moncrief said. “I’m not sensing the frustration or anger that I sensed when we dealt with Katrina and Rita.”
At a shelter in Nashville, where 175 evacuees gathered Monday, FEMA workers were not in evidence.
“We do have community relations folks heading to the shelters, and they will be starting to meet with those victims,” FEMA spokeswoman Debbie Wing said.
President Bush wasted no time flying to the region, canceling plans to speak at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Speaking with National Guard troops in Texas, Bush said, “I’m confident that ... if there is a human need, it will be met.”
It was a stark contrast to 2005. Back then, images of Bush surveying the devastation from high up in Air Force One and his infamous compliment to then FEMA-director Michael Brown that he was “doing a heck of a job” brought scathing criticism of his handling of the crisis.
A chagrined Bush ordered a top-to-bottom review of the government’s failed response.
The White House presided over weekly meetings to ensure it would be ready for the next major hurricane. It produced a “Lessons Learned” report that identified 125 recommendations.
Even so, despite $140 billion in spending and tax breaks by the U.S. government, the job of repairing the levees in New Orleans wasn’t finished when the biggest storm since Katrina hit.
The 150 miles of levees damaged or destroyed in 2003 were repaired the next year, said Maj. Gen. Don Riley, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said improvements were made to 70 more miles of the remaining 220 miles of levees. But only 25% of New Orleans’ levee system has been upgraded to withstand a 100-year storm. The improvements won’t be completed until 2011.
In the French Quarter on Monday, Domenic Fusca strummed a blues song on his guitar, seemingly unconcerned that Gustav has ripped off his roof, damaged his staircase and drenched his floors.
“I just wanted to stay put. This is my home,” said Fusca, 37. “It was good that people decided to split, though. I had this weird gut feeling that it may have gotten blown out of proportion, but it’s better that people got out and stayed safe.”
Bello reported from Baton Rouge, Stone from McLean, Va. Contributing: Larry Copeland, Donna Leinwand and Jerry Shriver in New Orleans; Richard Wolf in St. Paul; Judy Keen in Chicago; Tom Weir in Nashville; Gregg Zoroya in McLean; the Associated Press