August 29, 2005
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Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press
Hurricane Katrina quickly undid an effort to protect a storefront’s windows in New Orleans
John Bazemore/Associated Press
Strong winds damaged a building in Gulfport, Miss.
John Bazemore/Associated Press
A boat washed onto a highway in Gulfport, Miss. Hurricane Katrina is expected to move across southeast Louisiana and south Mississippi today, creating storm surge flooding.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
A police car was abandoned in flood waters in downtown New Orleans. National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that Katrina’s potential 15-foot storm surge, down from a feared 28 feet, was still substantial enough to cause extensive flooding.
Oscar Sosa/Bloomberg News
Capt. Rupert Lacy of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department tried to take a wind reading in Gulfport, Miss., today.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
The French Quarter was nearly deserted in the early morning hours before the storm arrived
Dave Martin/Associated Press
Blair Quintana, right, and Patrick Lampano took shelter in a doorway in the French Quarter today.
Dave Martin/Associated Press
Trees on Canal Street in New Orleans took a beating this morning.
Dave Martin/Associated Press
A van in high water in uptown New Orleans today. Heavy rains have flooded some homes to the ceilings, according to the Associated Press.
Andy Newman/Associated Press
National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield, left, and Billy Wagner, a hurricane liaison team member for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in Miami today.
August 29, 2005
High Winds and Rain Lash New Orleans and Southern Mississippi
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
and ABBY GOODNOUGH
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 – Hurricane Katrina pounded southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi as it came onshore today, carrying extremely damaging winds that began to lash New Orleans, a city perilously below sea level.
Most of the city’s 480,000 residents had already evacuated from the city but as many as 10,000 had taken shelter in the Superdome, which lost power today and started to leak rainwater, according to television and news agency reports.
The National Hurricane Center said early today that the center of the extremely dangerous hurricane was about 40 miles southeast of New Orleans and about 65 miles southwest of Biloxi. Maximum sustained winds are 135 miles per hour, having weakened from a Category 5. Hurricane force winds extend up to 125 miles from the center, and tropical storm force winds reach up to 230 miles from the center.
Power and telephone service flickered off in the city, where some residents and tourists decided to stay behind or were stranded. At a hotel near the Mississippi River about 1,000 employees, visitors and residents who were unable to evacuate holed up in the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, some with their pets.
“I understand that the storm is upon them,” said a spokeswoman for the hotel chain, Vivian Deuschl, after listening in to a call early today from the hotel’s general manager in New Orleans.
Ms. Deuschl said that this morning, they were all put into ballrooms and meeting rooms on the lower floors, away from windows. A generator was providing power, and there were movies and popcorn to keep people occupied.
In Mobile, a port city 140 miles east of New Orleans, vertical sheets of rain blew in tight circles, like whirlpools, and wind blew garbage cans down the streets this morning, though the brunt of Hurricane Katrina was not expected to move through until late afternoon.
The historic downtown, which is on Mobile Bay, faced a potential storm surge of up to 20 feet. The power failed around 7 a.m., and at least one hotel lost a piece of its metal roof, peeled off by the winds.
Katrina is expected to create storm surge flooding, with bands of very heavy rain continuing to move north across the area, the Hurricane Center said today.
Rainfall totals are expected to be at least eight to ten inches, causing flooding in the low-lying areas.
About 80 percent of New Orleans’ residents are believed to have heeded a mandatory evacuation order, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said.
“We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared,” the mayor, who issued the order to evacuate, said on Sunday. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
The city has avoided a direct hit from a powerful storm since Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In addition to the dangerous winds, Mr. Nagin said, Hurricane Katrina could bring 15 inches of rain and a storm surge of 20 feet or higher that would “most likely topple” the network of levees and canals that normally protect the bowl-shaped city from flooding.
That possibility was enough for many of the city’s 485,000 residents to heed the mayor’s call to leave, paralyzing traffic along major highways from just after daybreak on Sunday and into the evening.
“I probably won’t have a house when I go back,” Tanya Courtney, 25, who lives in the city’s French Quarter, said Sunday in Gulfport, Miss., where she and a group of friends bound for Atlanta stopped for a rest.
The approaching storm shut down much of the oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, which is responsible for one-quarter of American oil production. The price of oil rose more than $4 a barrel on Sunday.
The city
Today, howling wind from Hurricane Katrina peeled holes in the roof of the Superdome as thousands of people huddled inside, The Associated Press reported. Power was lost for a while, the A.P. said, though backup generators eventually restored it.
On Sunday, people waited five and six abreast in line for hours to get into the arena, which the city had designated as a shelter of last resort. They clutched children, blankets and pillows, oversize pieces of luggage or plastic bags filled with belongings.
“When you are on a holiday you don’t really follow these kind of things,” Neil Coffey, 35, a tourist from Britain, said Sunday as he stood in line to get into the Superdome. “We were surprised. We don’t get hurricanes like this at home.”
On Sunday outside the Superdome, which holds 70,000 people, security forces searched everyone entering for drugs, weapons and other contraband.
After crossing South Florida late last week, killing nine people as a weaker storm, Hurricane Katrina intensified over the warm waters of the gulf, growing early Sunday morning into a Category 5 storm, the strongest step on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Since records have been kept, there have only been three Category 5 storms to hit the United States – Hurricane Andrew, which ravaged Florida and Louisiana in 1992; Hurricane Camille, which cut a path through parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Virginia in 1969; and an unnamed storm that hit the Florida Keys in 1935.
President Bush, vacationing at his ranch in Texas, declared a state of emergency for the Gulf Coast, a move that cleared the way for immediate federal aid. Mr. Bush also urged people in the storm’s potential path to head for safer ground.
“We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities,” he said.
The president also participated in a videoconference on Sunday with disaster management officials who were preparing for the storm. And he spoke by telephone with the governors of the four states under immediate threat: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
In New Orleans, many restaurants and stores in the French Quarter were shuttered and hotels, almost all fully booked, struggled to accommodate visitors whose flights had been canceled. The hotels were also a refuge for many residents, who sought rooms above ground level in hope of staying dry.
“We call it a vertical evacuation,” said Joseph Fein, owner of the Court of Two Sisters, a French Quarter restaurant. Mr. Fein said the city was responding much as it had to many previous hurricane threats, but that Hurricane Katrina was “the most threatening we have seen.”
At the Omni Royal Orleans hotel, all 346 rooms were booked, with the hotel putting up about 100 employees and members of their families, said Amiri Hayden, the concierge. “Between guests who are stuck and employees who are staying here, every room is taken,” Mr. Hayden said.
Some out-of-town guests took taxis as far as Baton Rouge, 75 miles away, to find rental car agencies that were open, he said.
Louisiana state officials said that at one point during the evacuation of New Orleans on Sunday, more than 18,000 cars an hour were leaving the city.
“I think this storm is bigger than anything we have dealt with before,” Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said. “This is not a minor problem.”
On Sunday, officials in Attorney General Charles Foti’s office said they were investigating about a half-dozen cases of price gouging, including increased prices on gasoline-powered generators and hotel rooms. The Louisiana Legislature recently passed a law stiffening penalties for price gouging when hurricanes are in the gulf.
Farther east on the coast, the party atmosphere promoted by the region’s many casinos was nowhere in evidence. Casinos built on barges were dark on Sunday, and people all along the Mississippi Coast were ordered to evacuate.
In Gulfport, about 55 miles east of New Orleans, residents feared a repeat of Hurricane Camille, which smashed into the Mississippi Coast in 1969 with winds of 200 miles an hour, killing more than 250 people over several states.
“I’m afraid this is the one we’ve dreaded,” said Robert R. Latham Jr., the director of Emergency Management Operations for Mississippi. “I don’t think the scenario could be any worse for us.”
In Gulfport, the authorities made about a dozen schools and other public buildings available as shelters. But Joe Spraggins, the director of emergency operations for Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi to the east, urged residents to go to shelters only as a last resort. Most of the buildings were built years ago, Mr. Spraggins said, and not designed to withstand the anticipated winds of 140 to 150 miles an hour.
“We’re asking people to get out of the area,” he said on Sunday, “and to get out fast.”
Yet Mr. Spraggins and other emergency officials acknowledged that the hurricane could chase evacuees on a northeasterly route. Farther east in the Florida Panhandle, residents of barrier islands were urged to evacuate as Hurricane Katrina began sloshing water onto coastal roads and near homes.
“We’re all getting a little tired of going through this drill,” said Eric Landry of Pensacola, who was shuttering his house on Sunday afternoon, not quite a year after Hurricane Ivan ravaged that city. “But we’re not at the point of moving away. This is just what you have to live with.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose director, Michael D. Brown, flew to Baton Rouge on Sunday, was waiting to determine where the agency would need to deploy supplies and specialized personnel. A spokeswoman said FEMA had mobilized several hundred specialists, including about 20 medical teams and a smaller number of urban search and rescue teams.
The agency has also begun moving water, ice and military Meals Ready to Eat to sites in the Southeast, said the spokeswoman, Natalie Rule. Cara Every Calderon and her husband, Axel Calderon, flew to New Orleans from their home in Smithtown, N.Y., on Saturday to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They had reserved four nights at a hotel in the French Quarter, and when Ms. Calderon called to inquire about the storm, she said, the hotel told her, “Come on down.”
The couple ended up at the Superdome, roller suitcases in tow, after finding themselves trapped.
“We’re resilient,” Ms. Calderon said. “We’re New Yorkers. But this is a little over our heads.”
Joseph B. Treaster reported from New Orleans for this article, and Abby Goodnough from Gulfport, Miss. Duwayne Escobedo contributed reporting from Pensacola, Fla., Marko Georgiev from New Orleans, Jeremy Alford from Baton Rouge and Thomas J. Lueck from New York.
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