Good news about Gustav: It was no Katrina

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans can get back to its comeback.

Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina traumatized residents when its floodwaters broke through the levees that protect this city. Hurricane Gustav ended up a mere interruption in rebuilding.

The fragile levees survived Monday's assault, holding firm and sheltering this saucer-shaped city from devastating floods. Residents can breathe a little easier -- and start plotting their return to New Orleans.

"I just want to get back there ASAP," said Hester Smith, 38, who had evacuated to a shelter in Milton, Fla.

It won't be without some obstacles for residents of New Orleans. But Gustav didn't cause the life-changing damage wrought by Katrina.

The storm swirled into the fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns of Louisiana's Cajun country, an already fragile terrain on the state's southeastern coast.

In Plaquemines Parish, officials scrambled to fortify a levee in danger of collapse. Roofs were torn from homes, trees toppled and roads flooded. More than 1 million homes were without power. The extent of any damage to the oil and gas industry was unclear.

But the biggest fear -- that the levees surrounding New Orleans would break -- hadn't been realized.

Wind-driven water sloshed over the top of the Industrial Canal's floodwall -- the same structure that broke with disastrous consequences during Katrina -- and several Ninth Ward streets nearby were flooded with ankle- to knee-deep water. Still, city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers expressed confidence the levees would hold.

Gustav blew ashore around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie (pronounced ko-ko-DREE), a low-lying community 72 miles southwest of New Orleans.

Forecasters had feared a catastrophic Category 4 storm on the 1-to-5 scale, but Gustav weakened as it drew close to land, coming ashore as a Category 2 with 110-mph winds. It quickly dropped to a Category 1 as it steamed inland toward Texas. By late Monday it had been downgraded to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph.

Authorities reported seven deaths, all traffic-related, including four people killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.

In the days before the storm struck, nearly 2 million people fled coastal Louisiana under a mandatory evacuation order -- a stark contrast from Katrina.

Those evacuated included tens of thousands of poor, elderly and sick people who were put on buses and trains and taken to shelters and hotel rooms in several surrounding states.

It could be days until the full extent of the damage is known, especially in the fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns of bayou country, where rapid erosion in recent decades has destroyed swamps and robbed the area of a natural buffer against storms.

Keith Cologne, of Chauvin, not far from Cocodrie, 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 Orange Beach, Ala.

In St. Mary Parish, to the west, Deputy Sheriff Troy Brown cleared roads with a chain saw as he went out to assess damage. He found uprooted trees and houses without some shingles, but few signs of a monster hit. "Even the mobile homes are sitting there in one piece," Brown said.

One community in southeastern Louisiana feared its levee wouldn't hold. As many as 300 homes in Plaquemines Parish were threatened, and the parish president called a TV station to plead with any residents who stayed behind to flee.

While Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, the surge this time in New Orleans reached 12 feet, near the top of the Industrial Canal, on the eastern side of the city.

Officials expressed confidence all day long that the flood defenses in the eastern part of the city would hold. They were more concerned about the West Bank of the Mississippi River, where the $15 billion in levee improvements begun after Katrina have yet to be completed. But those floodwalls appeared to be holding, too.

Gustav was quickly marching inland, reducing the prospect of heavy rain in southern Louisiana. "From what I've seen, New Orleans' metro should be back in business" today, said Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center.

But Read said the storm will slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly into Arkansas, and could bring 20 inches of rain to those areas.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stood ready to distribute enough cartons of food, water, blankets and other supplies to sustain 1 million people for three days -- another contrast to Katrina, when thousands waited for rescue in the sweltering Superdome.

"With Katrina they didn't come and rescue us until the next day," said LaTriste Washington, 32, who stayed in her home during the 2005 hurricane and was rescued by boat. She was in a shelter in Birmingham, Ala., on Monday. "This time they were ready and had buses lined up for us to leave New Orleans."

Drinking water continued to flow in the city and the pumps that keep it dry never shut down, two critical service failings that contributed to Katrina's toll. But two-thirds of the city's electric customers were without power, as the storm damaged transmission lines and knocked 35 substations out of service.

The decision to reopen the city was eagerly awaited by those who fled the coast and watched the storm unfold on TV from shelters across the region.

Fights broke out at an overcrowded shelter in Shreveport. People who had slept, eaten and lived on cots for days struggled to get news about home from the lone television in the entire center. Doctors worried about medications running out and seven people were hospitalized, all in stable condition.

"People are desperate. They don't know if they are going to have a place to go home to," said Emma McClure, 37, who was at the shelter with her three children, three sisters and some 20 nephews. "They had three years to plan this and now I wish I had stayed in the city like I did during Katrina."

In Mississippi, at least three people had to be rescued from the floodwaters. An abandoned building in Gulfport collapsed, a few homes in Biloxi were flooded, and the ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Biloxi's casino row was swamped with 2 ½ feet of water.

As Gustav passed, authorities turned their attention to Hurricane Hanna, which could come ashore in Georgia and South Carolina late in the week. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Ike emerged as a new threat and is expected to become a hurricane in the next 36 hours as it moved across the Atlantic.