Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore early yesterday and charged toward this below-sea-level city with 233kph winds and the threat of a catastrophic storm surge.
Katrina edged slightly to the east shortly before making landfall near Grand Isle, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's wrath might not be directed at the vulnerable city.
Martin Nelson, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, said the northern part of the eyewall came ashore at Grand Isle, about 97km south of New Orleans, at about 5am.
It was moving northward at 24kph.
Katrina's fury was soon felt at the Louisiana Superdome, normally home of professional football's Saints, which became the shelter of last resort on Sunday for about 9,000 of the area's poor, homeless and frail.
Electrical power at the Superdome failed at 5:02am, triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting and is not strong enough to run the air conditioning.
Chenel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corp, the main energy power company in the region, said that 370,000 customers in southeast Louisiana were estimated to be without power.
Even though the storm was hours away from New Orleans, Katrina's advance winds were already blowing slate tiles off the old roofs of the French Quarter.
The wind was blowing the rain sideways, and debris was carried up more than 31m. Power was on and off in sections of the city, and emergency vehicles patrolled the main streets, their blue and red lights flashing.
"I'd rather watch this than watch a movie," said Steven Grades, 22, one of the Superdome evacuees, as he looked out through the windows at the gathering storm.
Katrina, which had weakened slightly overnight to a strong Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward before hitting land, which would put the western eyewall -- the weaker side of the strongest winds of the storm -- over New Orleans.
"It's not as bad as the eastern side. It'll be plenty bad enough," said Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Mayor Ray Nagin said he believed 80 percent of the city's 480,000 residents had heeded an unprecedented mandatory evacuation as Katrina threatened to become the most powerful storm ever to slam into the city.
"It's capable of causing catastrophic damage," said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. "Even well-built structures will have tremendous damage. Of course, what we're really worried about is the loss of lives.
"New Orleans may never be the same," he said.
Terry Ebbert, New Orleans director of homeland security, said more than 4,000 National Guardsmen were mobilizing in Memphis and will help police New Orleans streets.
The head of Jefferson Parish, which includes major suburbs and juts all the way to the storm-vulnerable coast, said some residents who stayed would be fortunate to survive.
"I'm expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard," parish council president Aaron Broussard said.
The evacuation itself claimed lives. Three New Orleans nursing home residents died on Sunday after being taken by bus to a Baton Rouge church. Don Moreau, of the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner's Office, said the cause was likely to have been dehydration.
Katrina, which cut across Florida last week, had intensified into a colossal Category 5 over the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, reaching top winds of 282kph before weakening as it neared the coast.
The storm held a potential surge of 5.5m to 8.5m that would easily top New Orleans' hurricane protection levees, as well as bigger waves and as much as 38cm of rain.
A hurricane warning was in effect for the north-central Gulf Coast from Morgan City, Louisiana, to the Alabama-Florida line. Tornado warnings were posted for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
For years, forecasters have warned of the nightmare scenario a big storm could bring to New Orleans, a bowl of a city that's up to 3m below sea level in spots and dependent on a network of levees, canals and pumps to keep dry from the Mississippi River on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other.
The fear is that flooding could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, as well as waste from ruined septic systems.
Nagin said he expected the pumping system to fail during the height of the storm. The mayor said the US Army Corps of Engineers was standing by to get the system running, but water levels must fall first.
"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."
Major highways in New Orleans cleared out late on Sunday after more than 24 hours of jammed traffic as people headed inland. At the peak of the evacuation, 18,000 people an hour were streaming out of southeastern Louisiana.
On inland highways in Louisiana and Mississippi, heavy traffic remained the rule into the night as the last evacuees tried to reach safety.
In Washington, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it has been advised that the Waterford nuclear plant about 32km west of New Orleans has been shut down as a precautionary measure.
New Orleans hasn't taken a direct hit from a hurricane since Betsy in 1965, when an 2.25m to 3.3m storm surge submerged parts of the city in 2.2m of water. Betsy, a Category 3 storm, was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.
Evacuation orders also were posted all along the Mississippi coast, and the area's casinos, built on barges, were closed early Saturday. Bands of wind-whipped rain increased on Sunday night and roads in some low areas were beginning to flood.
"Hopefully it will take a turn and we'll be spared the brunt of it, but it just don't look like that," said James Bosco, who was packing up a final few items from his beachfront apartment in Gulfport. "I just hope everybody makes it all right. We can always rebuild."
Alabama officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for low-lying coastal areas.
Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida as a much weaker storm on Thursday and was blamed for nine deaths. It left miles of streets and homes flooded and knocked out power to about 1.45 million customers. It was the sixth hurricane to hit Florida in just over a year.
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