Sept. 1, 2008 -- Hurricane Gustav is over the Gulf of Mexico, churning into monster storm on a trajectory to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, most likely as a powerful Category 3 hurricane. If it misses the battered city of New Orleans, it won't be by much.
Cuba took the brunt of the then-Category 4 storm as it washed over the island on Saturday before heading into the bathtub-warm waters of the Gulf, where it could still strengthen.
It's almost exactly three years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall over New Orleans and laid waste to the city. City Mayor Ray Nagan has ordered a mandatory evacuation, and residents have largely fled a city that's far from fully recovered from Katrina.
Thousands of "temporary" housing trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency still dot the landscape. Only two-thirds of the original population has returned. Construction workers have been racing around the clock to buttress the levees and floodwalls that hold back the water of Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico.
The storm is expected to make landfall west of New Orleans Monday evening, but the forecast is still somewhat uncertain.
"Beyond three days, forecasts for wind speed are very poor, they have no skill," Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center said, referring to the computer modeling results meteorologists use to predict storms. "It's not certain by any means that Gustav is going to come ashore in the U.S. as a major hurricane." That's looking more and more certain the longer Gustav spins over Gulf waters.
Location is similarly hard to predict. A ridge of high-pressure air over Florida is expected to break, allowing the storm to turn northward toward Louisiana. Officials report that it could still turn and strike anywhere between Houston, Texas, and Pensacola, Fla., a 500-mile long stretch of coast.
New Orleans may dodge a bullet, but is likely to experience at least tropical storm-force winds, according to reports.
Officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say the city is safer overall than it was before Hurricane Katrina hit. But the Corps' $12.8 billion rebuilding project isn't due to be completed until 2011.
Levees along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- both breached during Katrina -- have been repaired and outfitted with skeletons of huge steel plates set in foundations of reinforced concrete. The mouths of those two canals as well as the Orleans Avenue canal have all been fitted with floodgates.
"Those canals are protected to the 100-year storm level," said Randy Cephus, spokesman at the Army Corps of Engineers' Hurricane Protection Office. The 100-year storm level is the maximum water height expected from a brutal, once-a-century flood. "They will keep water from coming into the heart of the city."
In all, 220 of the 350 miles of levees in and around New Orleans have been updated, Cephus said.
But he acknowledged that the Gentilly and Lower Ninth Ward areas of the city -- two of the hardest hit by Katrina -- are still vulnerable to inundation. They lie near the crux of a v-shape of coastline facing the Gulf of Mexico that funnels storm surge waters directly into the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal.
In 2005, storm surges overwhelmed the canal's levees, causing massive flooding. The Corps has plans to build a huge protective flood gate at the mouth of the canal, but it won't be completed for at least two more hurricane seasons.
Harvey Johnson, Deputy Administrator for FEMA, said it's vital that residents along the Gulf Coast heed any calls to evacuate. Working in cooperation with state and local governments as well as the National Guard, the American Red Cross, and other disaster relief organizations, Johnson maintained the agency is far better prepared to handle Gustav than it was for Katrina.
"We've worked very, very hard planning and training and preparing for the next big hurricane, and Gustav is going to be it," he said. "Our objective is to instill confidence in the American public that government agencies can work together and be effective in a time of need."
"We're about to have that time of need arrive on our doorstep on Monday," he said.
Related Links:
Michael Reilly's blog: Strike Slip
Treehugger.com: Interview with Chris Mooney, author of "Storm World"
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