The US Gulf coast from far western Louisiana to the border between Alabama and Florida was under a hurricane warning as Gustav approached.
The National Hurricane Center upgraded a watch to a warning early yesterday, meaning that hurricane conditions were expected in the area within the next 24 hours.
Gustav dropped to a Category 3 storm as its top winds slowed to near 201kph. But forecasters said it was expected to regain strength and could become a Category 4 hurricane later yesterday.
Gustav was over the Gulf of Mexico about 684km southeast of the Mississippi River’s mouth at 5am and moving northwest at about 26kph.
Computer models show a projected path bearing straight for New Orleans, which was flooded three years ago almost to the day by Hurricane Katrina with the loss of 1,500 lives.
New Orleans officials ordered people in the low-lying city to evacuate starting yesterday morning.
Highways around the city were already jammed with cars and trucks and hundreds of people, many still emotionally scarred from the disaster three years ago, lined up to board buses to escape the approaching storm.
Gustav earlier swept across Cuba as a ferocious Category 4 storm, causing widespread damage but no deaths. It had previously killed at least 86 people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.
The center said an extremely dangerous storm surge of 5.4m to 7.6m was expected near and to the east of where the center of Gustav makes landfall on the Gulf Coast.
Energy companies, whose 4,000 platforms in the Gulf produce a quarter of US crude oil and 15 percent of its natural gas, braced for Gustav by evacuating personnel and shutting down three-fourths of their oil production.
The hurricane slammed into Cuba on Saturday afternoon, first raking over the Isle of Youth 64km off the southwestern coast, then coming ashore in Pinar del Rio, the island’s westernmost province and main tobacco region.
Cuban officials said the storm flattened trees, damaged buildings, demolished banana plantations and, on the Isle of Youth, washed boats ashore.
The Cuban weather service said one of its stations measured a wind gust of 340kph.
Officials said more than 250,000 people had been evacuated in Cuba’s four western provinces.
Also See: Oil rigs shut down for Gustav
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