This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/us/tropical-storm-isaac-on-verge-of-becoming-a-category-1-hurricane.html

The article has changed 14 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 9 Version 10
Hurricane Isaac Makes Landfall Along Gulf Coast Hurricane Isaac Makes Landfall Along Gulf Coast
(35 minutes later)
NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Isaac made landfall along the Gulf Coast on Tuesday night as a Category 1 storm, smaller than initially feared, forecasters said. NEW ORLEANS — On the eve of the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which brought widespread devastation after the colossal failure of the system built to protect the city, New Orleans on Tuesday night once again found itself facing the impending arrival of a huge and deadly storm.
The National Hurricane Center announced at about 8 p.m. Eastern that Hurricane Isaac had hit southeastern Louisiana with sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. The storm was moving northwest at a slow pace of 8 m.p.h., making serious flooding more likely as the storm lingers over land. There have already been reports of flooding and power failures in several areas along the Gulf Coast.   Isaac, which was upgraded Tuesday morning to a Category 1 hurricane from a tropical storm, churned slowly but with intensifying force toward the mouth of the Mississippi River. The storm made landfall at 7:45 p.m. Eastern time just southwest of the river, about 95 miles from New Orleans.
The National Hurricane Center said in a statement that a storm surge of eight feet was recorded at Shell Beach in Louisiana.  In a conference call shortly after the system was upgraded to hurricane status, federal officials warned again and again that the storm, which killed 29 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, would generate high seas, intense rain and serious flooding over coastal and inland areas for days to come.
“Now is the time to hunker down,” Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, said in a televised news conference as the storm came to shore. The hurricane will be the first test of the new $14.5 billion, 133-mile ring of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps put in place after Hurricane Katrina by the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that built the defenses that failed this city catastrophically in 2005.
The coast — and areas extending inland from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle — was bracing throughout the day for strong winds, heavy rain and flooding. The threat of tornadoes has also increased with the approach of the storm. On Tuesday morning, with the blare of a warning buzzer and the rumble of big motors moving tons of steel, two halves of a massive butterfly gate started moving toward each other to close off New Orleans from the anticipated 12-foot storm surge — making history. With the closing of the new gates, this corner of Lake Borgne, which allowed waters into the city that brought down flood walls and destroyed neighborhoods seven years ago, is now cut off with a barrier nearly two miles long, and the city’s first line of defense begins 13 miles farther out than when Katrina hit.
A hurricane warning was in effect for areas east of Morgan City, which sits on the Atchafalaya River in south-central Louisiana, and extending into Mississippi. That stretch of coast includes New Orleans. “We are ready for this,” said Tim Doody, the president of the regional levee board covering much of the New Orleans metropolitan area, which takes over the operation of the hurricane defenses once the corps has completed them.
“We fully expect that we will get the brunt of it,” said Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans. He called on residents to “hunker down,” saying, “Now is the time, in the next 24 to 36 hours, to do that.” By all accounts, this hurricane is nowhere near as powerful as Katrina was, but its breadth was potentially wider, with pounding rains and surging waves expected from east of Morgan City, La., to the Mississippi-Alabama border, including metropolitan New Orleans.
The city’s airport was closed early Tuesday, bus and streetcar service was suspended, and emergency shelters were opened. Some 680 National Guard troops were activated and on duty. After coming ashore on Tuesday night with 80-mile-per-hour winds, the center of the storm was predicted to linger over Louisiana through Thursday morning, said Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center, possibly slowing further from the leisurely 8-m.p.h. pace of its advance. Forecasters continued to predict a coastal storm surge of 6 to 12 feet, meaning that vehicles, poorly built homes and roads may wash away, some coastal communities may be cut off for days and flooding may be “certain death” in areas outside the levees.
Mandatory evacuations have been ordered in low-lying areas of several Louisiana parishes, but not in New Orleans, although Mr. Landrieu asked about 900 residents in neighborhoods not protected by levees to relocate temporarily. “The hazards are beginning — it is going to last a long time and affect a lot of people,” Dr. Knabb said.
On Tuesday afternoon, the storm was moving slowly to the northwest at 8 m.p.h. By 4 p.m. Central time, it was about 30 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River and 105 miles southeast of New Orleans. President Obama declared states of emergency in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi as the storm approached. “America will be there to help folks recover no matter what this storm brings,” he said at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa, “because when disaster strikes we’re not Democrats or Republicans first, we are Americans first.”
The storm had been projected to strike as a Category 2 hurricane, but its eventual force was revised downward Tuesday morning. It has been fickle and has confounded predictions all along. In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced on Tuesday that around 4,200 members of the National Guard had been activated and that there were thousands of available beds in shelters and more than 1,000 evacuees in parish, state or Red Cross-run shelters across the state. Both the governor and Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans announced that teams and vehicles were ready for the poststorm duty of search and rescue. Camouflage-painted Humvees could be seen on the streets of New Orleans as the National Guard made its presence known.
At a news conference in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said hurricane-force winds might last 6 to 10 hours, and 10 to 16 inches of rain could fall on some areas of the state. As Isaac’s target narrowed, mandatory evacuations were lifted in low-lying parts of Alabama but imposed in more places in Louisiana; eight parishes ordered evacuations in certain areas, while four others urged people to leave. People in the low-lying areas of Mississippi and Alabama had been ordered to evacuate, and both states had opened shelters. The Red Cross had opened 19 shelters in Mississippi and Alabama, and 18 in Louisiana. More than 1,000 people had taken advantage of them by 4 p.m., with more expected as night fell.
Mr. Jindal said he had activated 4,158 National Guard troops and that prisoners had been relocated from facilities in coastal parishes, some to state prisons. Along the coast between Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., the storm surge was the immediate concern, though the rain would bring its own problems soon enough. However, residents toughened by Katrina, which tossed floating casinos across the highway and stripped the coastline, saw Isaac as more a curiosity and a nuisance than a major threat.
The most serious danger may not be from the wind, according to forecasters, but from the enormous amount of water that the storm will bring with it and push in front of it. Officials warned of 12-foot storm surges along a broad area of the coast and days of nonstop rain, in some places possibly adding up to 20 inches of water. “If it’s a 1 or a 2, most people don’t flip out,” said Claire Parker, 23, who was a teenager when Katrina tore through.
“The slow motion and the large size of this system are the areas of concern,” Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a conference call with reporters. The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered the 12 casinos along the coast to close. As the sun set, families turned out to enjoy the grandeur of the churning ocean in between the bands of rain that had begun to blow sideways. “We know it’s going to get so you can’t see your hand in front of you, but for now it’s just beautiful,” said Zachary Broussard, who was walking along the coast in Biloxi in the pelting rain with Brandi Hardin, 25.
During a brief appearance Tuesday morning in Washington, President Obama warned Gulf Coast residents to heed evacuation warnings from local and federal officials. As the wind began to whistle past City Hall windows in New Orleans and several officials stood in their rain jackets, Mayor Landrieu said, “We are officially into the fight and the city of New Orleans is now on the front lines.” He urged residents to take the storm seriously, and singled out for criticism some who had gone to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain to watch the surf and otherwise enjoy themselves in a day of weather as erratic as Isaac itself.
“Now is not the time to tempt fate, now is not the time to dismiss official warnings,” Mr. Obama said. “You need to take this seriously.” At the lakefront, Rene Hebert was practicing his golf swing. “It’s the best day to practice into wind — I can work on my power,” said “On a calm day, it’ll be no problem.”
With the memory of the battering that his predecessor took after the Bush administration’s widely disparaged response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mr. Obama seemed to be taking pains to show that his administration was on top of things this time around. Several times during his remarks he specified that he had personally directed various federal agencies to do all they can. Others at the lakefront said they were not worried about Isaac, or in any case that they had confidence that the city was in control of this.
All storms have their own personalities, and this storm promises a different experience from Hurricane Katrina. While it could possibly hit New Orleans directly — unlike Katrina, which landed most forcefully in Mississippi but sent surge waters against the city’s faulty levees and flood walls — Isaac will have to contend with a $14.5 billion flood protection system that has been all but completed by the Army Corps of Engineers. “I’ve seen worse,” said Marlin Cummings, who lives in eastern New Orleans, which seven years ago saw as worse as it gets. And the streets gradually cleared, and people parked their cars on the raised “neutral ground” dividing larger streets to keep them out of the floodwaters that can swamp the city in any heavy rainfall.
To the east of Louisiana, there was some good news after the National Hurricane Center lifted a hurricane warning that had been in effect for portions of Alabama and Mississippi. Across the greater New Orleans area, preparations for the storm moved forward. Corps leadership monitored the preparations from an emergency operations center in its district headquarters, a long white building that sits hard by the bank of the Mississippi River. Had the storm been much stronger, the district leadership would have moved into a special stormproof bunker that sits inside a warehouse at the Army Corps’ district headquarters, as it did in Hurricane Katrina and Gustav in 2008.
Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama followed that announcement by lifting a mandatory evacuation order for portions of Baldwin and Mobile Counties, replacing it with voluntary evacuation orders for low-lying areas. The city’s sewerage and water board readied the pumps at the city’s major drainage canals; flood walls on two of the canals failed catastrophically in 2005. With Isaac on its way, gates were closed at the mouths of the canals to block storm surge, and pumps were readied to push rainwater out of the canals, said Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the board. “We’re ready for whatever Hurricane Isaac brings us.” The pumps have been watched closely by critics of the corps, who argue that they are faulty. Ms. St. Martin said that while a small number of pumps were out of service, “these pump stations are built with redundancy” and the stations have plenty of capacity to do the job.
Mandatory evacuations remain in place for parts of Mississippi, and shelters have opened all along the coast. Evacuations have also been announced in several communities outside the levees in South Louisiana, as well as for all of St. Charles Parish, west of New Orleans. As for the weak flood walls lining the canals that collapsed in Katrina, those are now secondary defenses against gates that have been built since the storm. “I’m so thankful that we have those closures at the mouths of the canals,” Mr. Doody said, “if not for that the flood walls inside of the canals would be tested again — by the entire volume of the lake, not just the water pumped from inside of the city.”
Curfews beginning at 7 p.m. have also been put in place in some counties in Mississippi. He said that the surge associated with the storm is smaller than the one the system is designed to withstand, but he said his board would be watching more than 20 miles of flood wall that line St. Bernard Parish east and southeast of the city — not for signs of collapse, but for damage they might have to deal with down the road. “Smaller events will cause much greater flood-side erosion of the levees,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Kim Severson from Atlanta; John Schwartz from New Orleans; Clifford Krauss from Houston; Lizette Alvarez from Tampa, Fla.; Dave Thier from St. Charles Parish, La.; Helene Cooper from Washington; and Christine Hauser from New York.

Mr. Doody joked that the storm now appears to be so much less a threat than early projections had suggested, saying, “This will be more like a quiz than a test.”

Kim Severson contributed reporting from Mobile, Ala., and David Thier from New Orleans.