New Orleans mayor orders evacuation

Reuters

EVACUATION: Residents wait to board buses and trains to evacuate New Orleans, Louisiana, ahead of Hurricane Gustav.

Reuters

MOVING OUT: Lower Ninth Ward resident Reverend Willie Calhoun removes belongings from his Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer before evacuating New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav.

Reuters

STORM PREPARATIONS: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, speaking at a press briefing on Hurricane Gustav, says an order for a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans could come soon if the storm holds its path.

Reuters

MOVING STORM: A NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Gustav as it hits Cuba, enroute to the United States.

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New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered the city's more than 239,000 residents to evacuate in the face of powerful Hurricane Gustav, which he called "the mother of all storms."

The evacuation order issued on Saturday was the first in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the historic Southern city in August 2005.

"This is the mother of all storms," Nagin said of Gustav, a monstrous Category 4 storm that could approach the central Louisiana coast just west of New Orleans on Monday.

"You need to be concerned and you need to get your butts moving and out of New Orleans right now," Nagin said at City Hall. "This is the storm of the century."

The evacuation order, which will not be physically enforced by officials, will start with the city's low-lying West Bank starting at 8am (1am Monday NZT) on Sunday, followed by the East Bank at noon (5am Monday NZT), Nagin told reporters.

Residents have the choice to remain behind and weather the storm, but "that would be one of the biggest mistakes that you could make in your life," Nagin said.

He said people might have to chop through the roofs of their houses to escape rising waters if they stay.

"Make sure you have an axe," he said.

But one day after the third anniversary of Katrina, many had already decided to abandon the city, much of which lies below sea level.

Thousands of people fled New Orleans earlier on Saturday. Hoping to avoid the 2005 spectacle of desperate city residents crammed into the New Orleans Superdome, the government lined up hundreds of buses and trains to evacuate 30,000 people who cannot leave on their own.

About 10,000 people left the city by bus or train on Saturday, Nagin said. The rest of the 20,000 people that had requested evacuation assistance would leave on Sunday, he added.

Many evacuees were issued wrist bands with bar codes that will allow city officials to track them.

Gustav crashed across the Cuban mainland on Saturday and could hit the US Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, the second-highest on the five-stage Saffir-Simpson scale, the US National Hurricane Center said.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, plunged under water by Katrina's floodwaters, hundreds of residents packed belongings into cars and trucks and left. Some had returned home only a few months ago after fleeing Katrina.

"After Katrina, you've got to leave," said Ruby Hall, a longtime resident, pointing to the place on the timber frame of the porch where Katrina's waters rose. "I'm not going to chance it, not with my grandchild."

The city's West Bank was largely spared by Katrina but could see "significant flooding" because its 3-metre levees are no match for Gustav's storm surge, which could top 20 feet, Nagin said.

Katrina's massive storm surge broke through protective levees on August 29, 2005, and flooded 80 percent of the city. New Orleans degenerated into chaos as stranded storm victims waited days for rescue.

The hurricane killed about 1500 people along the US Gulf Coast and caused US$80 billion in damages, making it the costliest US natural disaster.

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways leading out of the city on Saturday, and six low-lying parishes - the Louisiana equivalent of US counties - issued evacuation orders.

All major Louisiana interstates will allow only one-way traffic away from the coast starting at 4am (9pm NZT) on Sunday. The last flight out of the New Orleans airport is scheduled to depart at 6pm (11am Monday NZT) on Sunday.

In all, 11.5 million people are in the path of Gustav, according to the US Census Bureau.

Walter Parker, a security guard who was trapped for eight days in his apartment during the Katrina flooding, lined up outside the Union Passenger Terminal as families with bags packed and children in tow waited for transportation.

"I don't want to see another Katrina, with dead bodies floating in the water," Parker said.

- Reuters