Hurricane Gustav slammed into the heart of Louisiana's fishing and oil industry with 110 mph (177 kph) winds Monday then faded as it moved inland, delivering only a glancing blow to New Orleans that raised hopes the city would escape the kind of catastrophic flooding brought by Katrina three years ago.
Wind-driven water sloshed over the top of the Industrial Canal's floodwall, but city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers said they expected the levees, still only partially rebuilt after Katrina, would hold. Flood protections along the canal broke with disastrous effect during Katrina, submerging St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward.
"We are cautiously optimistic and confident that we won't see catastrophic wall failure," said Col. Jeff Bedey, commander of the Corps' hurricane protection office.
The nearly 2 million people who left coastal Louisiana on a mandatory evacuation order watched TV coverage from shelters and hotel rooms hundreds of miles away. While New Orleans wasn't submerged, there were scores of homes that suffered damage. In Terrebonne Parish, located in the southeast part of the state, several homes had torn roofs, but winds were still too fierce for officials to fan out and assess the damage.
Keith Cologne of Chauvin, Louisiana, looked dejected after talking by telephone to a friend who didn't evacuate. "They said it's bad, real bad. There are roofs lying all over. It's all gone," said Cologne, staying at a hotel in Alabama.
In New Orleans' Upper Ninth Ward, about half the streets closest to the canal were flooded with ankle- to knee-deep water as the road dipped and rose. Two small vessels had broken loose from their moorings in the canal and were resting against a wharf. There were no immediate reports of any damage to the canal.
By mid afternoon Monday, the rain had stopped in the French Quarter, the highest point in the city. The wind was breezy but not fierce, and some of the approximately 10,000 people who chose to defy warnings and stay behind began to emerge. But knowing that the levees surrounding the city could still be pressured by rising waters, no one was celebrating just yet.
Mayor Ray Nagin said the city wouldn't know until late afternoon if the vulnerable West Bank area of the city which lies to one side of the Mississippi River would stay dry. Worries about the level of flood protection in an area where enhancements to the levees are years from completion were a key reason Nagin was so insistent residents evacuate the city.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie, a low-lying community 72 miles (116 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm on a scale of 1 to 5. The storm weakened to a Category 1 later in the afternoon. Forecasters feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.
As of noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.
Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause fuel prices to spike. A risk modeling firm, Eqecat Inc., projected Monday that Gustav could knock out capacity for about 5 percent of both oil and natural gas production in the Gulf for the next year. But oil prices actually tumbled to $111 a barrel as the storm weakened.
The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half of the United States' refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output.
Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
The nation was nervously watching to see how officials would deal with Gustav almost exactly three years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed roughly 1,600 people in the region.
President George W. Bush, who skipped the Republican convention for presidential candidate John McCain to monitor the storm from Texas, applauded the efforts.
"The coordination on this storm is a lot better than on _ than during Katrina," Bush said noting how the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had been working in concert.
For all their seeming similarities, Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina were different in one critical respect: Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet (more than 8 meters), a far higher wall of water than Gustav hauled ashore.
Katrina was a bigger storm when it came ashore in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm and it made a direct hit on the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Gustav skirted along Louisiana's shoreline at "a more gentle angle," said National Weather Service storm surge specialist Will Shaffer.
The storm surge in the Industrial Canal reached 12 feet (3 1/2 meters) _ the same height as the lowest wall. At the West Bank area waters could still rise and pressure incomplete levees over the next day as the storm blusters inland.
"Right now, we feel we're not going to have a true inundation," said Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of the $15 billion project to rebuild the Army Corps of Engineers' levee and floodwalls in the New Orleans-area.
The city's emergency preparedness director, Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, said residents might be allowed to return 24 hours after the tropical storm-force winds die down.
Other evacuated areas along the coast may be away from home for longer, said National Hurricane Center director Bill Read. The hurricane will likely slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly Arkansas, and those areas could then get 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rainfall.
In Mississippi, officials said a 15-foot (4 1/2-meter) storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns devastated by Katrina. Officials said at least three people near the Jordan River had to be rescued from the floodwaters.
Gustav was the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth, Hanna, strengthened from a tropical storm into a hurricane Monday near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos islands. Forecasters said it could come ashore in Georgia and South Carolina late in the week. A ninth, Tropical Storm Ike, formed late Monday afternoon in the Caribbean east of the Leeward Islands.
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Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer, Janet McConnaughey, Robert Tanner, Cain Burdeau, Alan Sayre, and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report from New Orleans. Vicki Smith in Boutte and Doug Simpson in Baton Rouge also contributed. Michael Kunzelman reported from Lafayette, and Holbrook Mohr contributed from Gulfport, Mississippi.
