Storm is called Gustav, but New Orleans hears 'Katrina'

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By Howard Witt

They had to cut short the funerals for the final seven victims of the last catastrophic hurricane so that officials could rush off to begin a massive evacuation Saturday ahead of the next one.

Precisely three years to the hour after Hurricane Katrina slammed into metropolitan New Orleans, flooding the city, killing more than 1,800 people and displacing at least a million others, city officials interred the last unidentified bodies of Katrina victims inside austere granite crypts at a new memorial cemetery.

Hundreds of bells were rung, a lone trumpet played a gospel hymn then the mayor, the police chief, the coroner and other emergency officials raced back to a command post Friday to prepare for a possible citywide evacuation ahead of Gustav, the storm newly elevated to hurricane status. If it stays on its current trajectory into the Gulf of Mexico, Gustav is aimed straight for the Louisiana coast.

"God is reminding us on the [anniversary] of Katrina that he can send Mother Nature back," said Russel Honore, the retired Army lieutenant general who commanded New Orleans rescue efforts after Katrina.

State and federal officials in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—all of which could lie in Gustav's potential path—activated voluntary coastal evacuation plans beginning Saturday, with mandatory evacuation orders to follow early Sunday if necessary.

At its current speed, the National Hurricane Center warned, Gustav could strike the Gulf Coast on Monday afternoon as a major Category 3 or 4 storm after passing over the Cayman Islands and western Cuba before heading into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

A sense of foreboding and urgency mounted Friday across this stricken city still struggling to resurrect itself from Katrina's destruction even as local, state and federal officials declared that, unlike three years ago, they would not leave tens of thousands of the poorest New Orleanians behind to fend for themselves.

With the city's loose network of protective levees still only partially rebuilt after Katrina smashed them, 700 chartered buses headed toward New Orleans while mustering posts were readied across the city to accommodate an estimated 30,000 ailing, infirm or impoverished citizens without the means to evacuate themselves. They were to begin leaving the city Saturday morning for shelters in the interior of Louisiana and surrounding states.

A mandatory evacuation order for this below-sea-level city could come early Sunday morning, Mayor Ray Nagin announced, when "contraflow" provisions will kick in on the region's highways, directing all lanes away from the coast.

This time, officials said, there will be no "shelters of last resort" inside the city—meaning there will be no repeat of the hellish post-Katrina scenes at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, where tens of thousands of hurricane victims sweltered for nearly a week awaiting rescue.

Any of New Orleans' estimated 310,000 residents who ignore orders to leave accept "all responsibility for themselves and their loved ones," announced Jerry Sneed, the city's emergency preparedness director.

Meanwhile, schools and universities announced they would shut down well into the week. All the city's hotels planned to close down beginning Saturday as a way to force tourists to leave. Officials began transporting prisoners out of area jails. At least 1,500 National Guard troops arrived in the city to help keep order and enforce a curfew that's expected if the city is ordered to be emptied.

"I want to put everyone on alert that this storm is a very serious matter," Nagin told a news conference Friday afternoon.

"What you're going to see is the product of three years of planning, training and exercising at all levels of government, starting with the local and the state level and leading up to the federal level," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday from New Orleans. "So we're clearly better prepared."

Despite the official assurances that their property would be protected, many New Orleans business owners stung by the chaotic and lawless aftermath of Katrina were taking no chances.

ATMs along Canal Street sported fresh signs saying they would remain empty until after the storm passes. Workers who had been using plywood sheets to rebuild houses and businesses abruptly shifted their efforts to boarding up windows and doors as protection against looters.

"It's not the wind or the water I'm worried about," said Tyler Malejko as he nailed thick wooden planks to the window frames of his wife's upscale kitchen cabinetry store in the Mid-City neighborhood. "The police couldn't protect anybody the last time, and I have no confidence things will be any different now."

Elsewhere across the city, pockmarked with 65,000 blighted houses destroyed by Katrina and yet to be razed or rebuilt, there were signs of mounting psychological distress. Calls to a mental health hot line at the Louisiana State University medical center in New Orleans spiked Thursday and Friday.

"The stress is obviously compounded by the fact that there is now the threat of a major hurricane again," said Dr. Howard Osofsky, chairman of the LSU psychiatry department. "People are worrying what will happen to their homes they have worked so hard to rebuild. People are tired. They've been through so much."

Some beleaguered New Orleans residents were predicting they might choose to never return if Gustav drives them out again. Osofsky said he spoke with one exhausted professional who was planning a "last supper"—a dinner among friends before they evacuated the city forever.

Down in the Lower 9th Ward, one of the areas worst hit by Katrina's flooding, Willie Fernandez and his elderly mother were making a similarly grim calculation. After nearly three years spent painstakingly rebuilding his family's two homes on Caffin Avenue, Fernandez, a flooring contractor, was loading up a trailer with building materials and large home appliances and preparing to take his family to safety.

"This just reawakens all of Katrina's horrors," Fernandez said. "We are lifelong 9th Ward residents. But it really makes you wonder if it's all going to be worth it again."