Fragile city awaits new onslaught

The streets of New Orleans lie waiting for the hurricane

By Kevin Connolly
BBC News, New Orleans

For 36 hours over the weekend the wild, exuberant, damaged city of New Orleans slowly drained of life and colour as its anxious people weighed the uncertainties of driving north against the sure danger of staying.

Nowhere does life in America feel more fragile than here, behind the network of levees protecting one of the few cities near the sea anywhere in the world which lie at least partly below sea-level.

Hurricane Katrina exposed flaws at every level in American governance - the authorities in New Orleans misjudged the warnings and mishandled the local planning.

The federal government, led by an out-of-touch George W Bush (remember how he flew over the aftermath, rather than into it), proved for all its resources that it lacked the capacity to help and protect its own people.

Even the Army Corps of Engineers - charged with building a network of earthen defences in the middle of the 1960s - allowed their deadlines to slip until they were estimating a generous 50 years to complete the job.

And not all the levees that they did finish were strong enough to withstand the surging sea they were designed to hold back.

Bearing all that in mind, it was perhaps not surprising that the highways heading north out of the city were choked with traffic from Saturday afternoon.

Katrina left 80% of New Orleans under water, almost drowning three centuries of culture and life in one of America's oldest cities.

Mayor Ray Nagin did his bit, too, with talk of how people should "be afraid" of the "storm of the century".

He warned that anyone planning to ride out the storm in their own home should keep an axe to hand because they would have to cut their own way to freedom through the wreckage of their homes.

As I went for a final walk around the French quarter before the dusk curfew took effect, it struck me that those factors between them had prompted exactly the orderly mass exodus for which the authorities must have hoped.

Quiet times

It was eerily quiet, the atmosphere something like you might remember from those episodes of the Twilight Zone where some unearthly force removed any signs of daily life from the planet but left the tools of daily life, the buildings and the cars, untouched.

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New Orleans 'like a ghost town'

Sounds you rarely hear in American cities, like the bells of small chapels chiming the quarter hours, or the fabric of flags snapping in the quickening air, were suddenly clear.

A patrol of four part-time soldiers of the National Guard passed me on the far side of the street - one of them raised his giant styrofoam cup of coffee in silent salute as they strolled round a corner and were lost to sight.

A middle-aged man in a Homeland Security polo shirt sat on the wooden veranda of an elegant town house, a holstered pistol dark against his fawn-coloured chinos.

At around the moment when the curfew took effect Louisiana state authorities reckoned that there were no more than 10,000 people in New Orleans, a city which ordinarily has a population of more than 20 times that.

For those people who have decided to run the risk of remaining here, there is nothing left to do once the spare batteries and extra bottles of water have been bought than to wait and worry.

A calm moment among the anxious times as people flee Hurricane Gustav

Local TV stations offer conflicting visions of how Gustav might unfold - every so often it dips in strength, but tropical storms fuel themselves by sucking heat and moisture from the warm late summer seas.

At the time of writing this particular storm system is 220 miles (354km) across and the hurricane force winds at the heart of it are blowing over an area 65 miles (105km) wide.

It is not possible to say when or where exactly Gustav will cross the coast, except to say that it is likely to be somewhere in Louisiana.

More than 12 hours before the eye of the storm was expected to make landfall, the thick, humid clouds that had hung over the city throughout Sunday suddenly seemed to quicken and boil as torrential rain began to fall.

It felt like a portent of much worse to come.

There comes a point in all such moments of crisis when our capacity to plan and prepare reaches a limit and there is nothing left to do but wait.

For New Orleans, that anxious moment is now.