With Gustav approaching hurricane strength and showing no signs of veering off a track to slam into the Gulf Coast, authorities across the region began laying the groundwork on Thursday to get the sick, elderly and poor away from the shoreline.
The first batch of 700 buses that could ferry residents inland were being sent to a staging area near New Orleans, and officials in Mississippi were trying to decide when to move residents along the coast who were still living in temporary homes after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The planning for a potential evacuation is part of a massive outline drafted after Katrina slammed ashore three years ago, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and stranding thousands who couldn’t get out in time. As the region prepared to mark the storm’s anniversary yesterday, officials expressed confidence those blueprints made them ready for Gustav.
PHOTO: AP
“There are a lot of things that are different between now and what we faced in 2005 when Katrina came ashore,” said US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was flying to Louisiana to meet with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Bobby Jindal. “We’ve had three years to put together a plan that never existed before.”
With Gustav still several days away, authorities cautioned that no plans were set in stone, and had not yet called for residents to leave. Projections showed the storm arriving early next week as a Category 3 storm, with winds of 179kph or greater, anywhere from Florida to eastern Texas. But forecasts are extremely tentative several days out, and the storm could change course and strength.
At a news conference on Thursday, Nagin said an evacuation order was likely in the coming days, but he didn’t expect officials to tell people to leave before today.
Should officials order an evacuation, police and firefighters will drive through neighborhoods with bull horns to alert residents. City officials have said they won’t force people to leave but those who stay will be assuming all risks and responsibilities for their families.
In a conference call between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local officials, Harvey Johnson, FEMA’s deputy administrator, cautioned that officials needed to stick to protocols as the storm unfolded.
“It’s very, very important that we play the way we practiced and trained over the last year and a half,” he said. “There’s a way that we operate. There’s a chain of command. There’s a way that we interact with each other. And we can’t afford to be in a disorganized way as we confront the challenges that we’re going to see here over the next five or six days.”
Governors in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas pre-declared states of emergency in an attempt to build a foundation for federal assistance. Federal officials said resources and personnel to provide post-storm aid were pouring into the Gulf Coast states from other parts of the country on Thursday.
Amid all the preparations, the city still planned to recognize the anniversary of Katrina. New Orleans planned to hold a “symbolic” burial service for unidentified Katrina victims and a bell-ringing to mark that storm’s three-year anniversary yesterday but canceled the jazz funeral that had been planned to precede the service and a candlelight vigil at Jackson Square.
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