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.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.