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Louisiana Calls for Evacuations as Rising Water Traps Dozens
Hurricane Isaac Drenches Coast, Trapping Scores
(about 4 hours later)
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana officials on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of some 3,000 people in a parish outside New Orleans and are continuing to rescue dozens of others trapped in the same area by rapidly rising floodwaters caused by Hurricane Isaac.
NEW ORLEANS — Seven years to the day that Hurricane Katrina and levee failures unleashed a deluge of devastation on the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Isaac brought its own distinctive mode of destruction on Wednesday, drenching the coast not with a quick blow but with an unremitting smothering.
Plaquemines Parish has emerged so far as the area of southeastern Louisiana most damaged by the storm, which continues to crawl over the Louisiana coast carrying with it 70 mile per hour winds and driving rain that have led to calamitous flooding throughout the region.
It pummeled the Mississippi Coast with relentless roundhouse jabs, while pinning southern Louisiana under a saturating rainfall. On its crawl up from the coast, Isaac dumped more than a foot of rain in some places and shoved before it a violent storm surge that would soon bring back the terrible old images of 2005: people marooned on rooftops, rescue workers breaking into attics with axes and the rescued clutching what little they had left.
On Wednesday afternoon, the National Weather Service downgraded the system to a tropical storm, but cautioned in a statement that “life-threatening hazards from storm surge and inland flooding are still occurring.”
The worst-hit part of the coast was Plaquemines Parish, La., the finger of land that follows the Mississippi River from Orleans Parish out into the Gulf of Mexico, and the place where both Isaac and Katrina first made landfall.
The residents of Plaquemines Parish, where at least 800 houses had flooded to some degree, needed no reminding.
Fears that a locally built gulf-side levee would be overtopped by Isaac’s massive surge were well founded. Those on Plaquemines Parish’s east bank who ignored Monday’s order to leave were forced into their attics when the gulf poured in, filling up the bowl between the levees with up to 14 feet of water.
“We haven’t seen anything like this, not even with Katrina,” said Billy Nungesser, the parish’s president. “Those areas that didn’t flood for Katrina were flooded for this storm. If this is a Category 1 storm, I don’t want to see anything stronger.”
Dozens of people had to be pulled to safety by rescue workers and neighbors. As of Wednesday evening, water was beginning to creep up the west bank of the parish as well, prompting officials to go door to door to evacuate what is effectively the bottom two-thirds of the parish.
Mr. Nungesser said that officials had concluded that levees protecting part of the parish would not be tall enough to hold back quickly accumulating water. “We don’t believe we have enough height to keep the water back,” he said. Gov. Bobby Jindal said officials had been mulling causing a breach in one of the eight-foot-high levees to keep it from overtopping.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, not even Katrina,” said a visibly rattled Billy Nungesser, the parish president, in a briefing to reporters.
Firefighters and state police officers are going door to door in the area, and evacuees, including about 65 in a nursing home, are to be transported to higher ground in ambulances or in school buses driven by National Guard troops, officials said. More than 400 people are already in emergency shelters in the parish.
The same theme was repeated everywhere, by Kim Duplantier, a school principal whose home in Plaquemines had survived multiple hurricanes but was filled to ruin with water on Wednesday; by the mayor of Grand Isle, La., a coastal community flooded and cut off from the mainland; and by A. J. Holloway, the mayor of Biloxi, Miss., who now wishes he had ordered people to leave.
“I never thought it would turn out like this,” said Tieeka Matthews, who was in a shelter with her three children. “I have nowhere to go, no money, no clothes. Each year, you just wonder.”
The skepticism with which Gulf Coast residents, including Mr. Holloway, viewed Isaac — which was downgraded from a Category 1 hurricane to a tropical storm by midafternoon on Wednesday — proved treacherous.
On Wednesday morning, another levee, on the east bank of the parish, was overtopped, causing extensive flooding and stranding more than 100 people who ignored evacuation orders. Dozens of people were still awaiting rescue on rooftops and in attics.
“I really didn’t anticipate this,” said Mr. Holloway, as he wheeled his sport utility vehicle to the edge of Highway 90, a cozy coastal road usually filled with carloads of beachgoers and casinogoers but now a steadily swelling river. “There’s a lot more water than I would have thought.”
The levee is not one of the large, federally maintained earthworks lining the Mississippi River, but a locally maintained levee about eight feet high, and lower than the 12-foot surge that hit it, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers.
In New Orleans, the decision by most residents to stay did not turn out to be disastrous. Trees were down across the city, and streets flooded, and three-quarters of the city was without power, as it will be for several days for more than 600,000 across the state, until the wind dies down enough for utility workers to come in. But despite a few nervous moments, the city’s all but finished $14.5 billion flood protection system seems to have worked.
Mr. Jindal visited the parish Wednesday afternoon, and said search-and-rescue teams were in the area to help.
Outside the city, severe flooding was widespread as Isaac sat defiantly on the coast, leaving no doubt about its destructive capability. The National Hurricane Center expected the storm to drop up to 25 inches of rain on some parts of the Gulf Coast, and cited a measurement of nearly 23 inches in Arabi, La., right over the parish line from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Tornado warnings were also in effect in several Mississippi counties.
Federal emergency officials warned at mid-afternoon on Wednesday that for many areas — both near the coast and well inland — the worst was yet to come.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said Wednesday that more than 4,000 people were in shelters across the state, and that 5,000 members of the National Guard had been deployed to help in response efforts. What is perhaps most remarkable about the storm is that there are still no reported fatalities, especially considering the degree to which it caught gulf residents by surprise.
“This is a very slow-moving, very large storm, and conditions are continuing to deteriorate,” Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, said on a conference call.
“Initially, the storm only being a tropical storm instead of a hurricane, many people, especially the people who live down there, didn’t have a whole lot of concern,” said Deano Bonano, an aide to a parish councilman, referring to the town of Lafitte outside the levee. By Wednesday afternoon, the bayou that splits the town was rising so rapidly that scores, if not hundreds, of people were facing potentially days of being cut off from the world.
Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said that in areas where the storm had already hit, “the winds and the rain are only halfway through.”
“I think everyone was surprised by this,” said Denny Mecham, the executive director of the new Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, which was inches from taking in water. “They try to prepare you, but for people who are used to a Cat. 3 or Cat. 5, this doesn’t seem like much,” she said. “Everyone was saying, ‘We’ll be open by Thursday morning.’ Well, this is not how this one is turning out.”
In some of those areas, he said, about 10 inches of rain have already fallen, and “potentially, up to 20 inches seems quite possible.”
The same calculus was relied upon in Plaquemines (pronounced PLAK-uh-men) Parish, whose residents are almost by definition hardy and self-reliant. Shrimpers, oystermen, ranchers and workers in the oil patch live together on this stretch of coastline divided by the Mississippi River nearly from head to foot, and they have been through it all: multiple hurricanes, the worst of the BP oil spill and a preference for occupations that are not generally associated with comfort and security. The parish was largely walled out of the federal levee system, much to the anger of the residents. They know what that means.
“It is going to take a while for this to spin down,” Mr. Knabb said.
“We knew it was a matter of time,” said Ms. Duplantier, 44, who moved with her husband to the now-submerged community of Braithwaite so they would have space to keep their horses, pigs, dogs, goats and cats. “We just figured we’d ride it out and see how long it would last. But we did not think in our wildest dreams that a Cat. 1 would do this.”
The center of the storm is not expected to pass out of Louisiana and into Arkansas until Thursday night.
She evacuated, and her husband and her parents stayed behind to look after the animals. But they spent much of Wednesday watching the water rise, and were reached by boat after eight hours of being stranded. They had figured, she said, that “this was not the big one.”
“There is another half of the storm to go for most people who have already begun to experience it,” he said. “For some folks in the path, the event and the weather haven’t even begun. We are still way early before this is all over.”
Until it was. Solutions to getting the water out of the east bank of Plaquemines, which could take days to drain, are not straightforward. The Army Corps of Engineers is rounding up portable pumps from Baton Rouge and elsewhere that can be used to pump floodwaters into the Mississippi, but such pumps are slow.
With the storm center creeping northwest at just 6 miles per hour, the officials said, it will take some time before they can assess the full damage, move supplies and equipment in, and begin to restore power and other services. In the meantime, they urged people to be patient and stay inside.
Mr. Nungesser, with the support of Mr. Jindal, said that the plan was to punch holes in the gulf levee to speed up the draining, as they did after Hurricane Gustav in 2008, and that a team could begin doing that as early as Thursday afternoon.
“It is extremely difficult to get back into areas that are still under hurricane- and tropical-storm-force winds,” Mr. Fugate said.
And still Isaac trudged on, drenching the towns of the north bank of Lake Pontchartrain on Wednesday night and heading at an agonizing 6 miles per hour in the direction of Baton Rouge. Officials warned that the risks were far from over, as flooding was a threat not only along the coast but in mid-Louisiana, upstate Mississippi and the drought-starved regions north. On Wednesday afternoon, Isaac was flooding towns farther inland with its unceasing rain, and was far from finished with southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
The Coast Guard was bringing in helicopters to relieve the hardest-hit areas, like Plaquemines Parish, and “we will get those airborne as fast as we can,” Vice Admiral Robert Parker said.
“There is another half of the storm to go for most people who have already begun to experience it,” W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said on a conference call with reporters. “For some folks in the path, the event and the weather haven’t even begun. We are still way early before this is all over.”
New Orleans appeared to have avoided major damage, but the city was littered with fallen trees and power lines, and few traffic lights were working. Some streets were under several feet of water as rain continued to fall. More than 600,000 residents of Louisiana were without power, nearly a third of them in New Orleans.
Campbell
Robertson and John Schwartz reported from New Orleans. David Thier contributed reporting from Plaquemines Parish, La., and Kim Severson from Biloxi, Miss. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
The city declared a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Wednesday, following the lead of neighboring parishes. There have been a handful of arrests for looting, the authorities said.
The longer the storm lingers, the more pressure it is putting on the levees and other flood-protection systems along the coast.
The National Weather Service said that the slow passage of the storm brought a heightened risk of tornadoes and flash flooding hundreds of miles inland from Louisiana, and across Mississippi and Alabama to Florida.
The storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds have slowed from 80 miles per hour during the morning and are expected to weaken further as the system moves inland.
In Jefferson Parish, there was anxiety about two communities not protected by levees: Grand Isle and Lafitte.
Mandatory evacuations had been ordered in both places, but while only about 30 residents remained in Grand Isle as the storm bore down, far fewer had heeded the warning in Lafitte.
“Many people, especially the people who live down there, didn’t have a whole lot of concern” initially, with the system at only tropical storm strength, said Deano Bonano, an aide to a parish councilman. “Then it ramped up pretty quickly.”
By late Tuesday night, two feet of water had inundated parts of Grand Isle, a barrier island. There was significantly less flooding in Lafitte. Though the storm’s direction had helped by pushing water out, that direction may change later Wednesday, and flooding there was likely.
This storm is the first test of a $14.5 billion, 133-mile ring of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps installed after Hurricane Katrina by the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that built the defenses that failed New Orleans catastrophically in 2005.
President Obama was receiving briefings on the storm by phone as he finished a two-day campaign swing to three college campuses in three states.
Mr. Obama also spoke on a conference call with Governor Jindal, Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama, Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi and Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans.
Sensitive on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to the political perils of appearing out of touch, the White House released a statement that Mr. Obama had directed FEMA to provide all resources needed by local and state authorities.
“The president asked the governors to continue to identify any additional needs if they arise as the effects of Isaac and the response efforts continue,” the White House statement said.
While the current storm is nowhere near as powerful as Hurricane Katrina, its pounding, driving rains and surging waves are lashing towns from east of Morgan City, La., to the Mississippi-Alabama border.
Waters from the gulf pushed onto the coast through the night in Mississippi and Alabama, where thousands had lost power and 60 m.p.h. winds knocked out transformers and stripped palm trees. Several inches of rain fell overnight, flooding parts of the small cities along the coast. The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered the 12 casinos along the coast to close.
The authorities in Mississippi have reported making a number of rescues, including that of a family with a 6-month-old baby and a dog who had been living on a houseboat on the Pearl River near the Mississippi-Louisiana border.
On Wednesday, Biloxi, Miss., was being hammered by bands of wind and rain. A curfew had been extended to noon, and the city’s streets were virtually empty. The police were stopping the few drivers on the streets.
The coast itself was a study of gray on gray: It was impossible to determine where the gulf’s waters ended and the overcast skies began.
Paul and Kim Punzo, who live just across the street from the banks of the Biloxi River, had water up to their driveway. Mr. Punzo expected three more feet.
“It’s all in the timing, with the storm surge and the high tide, so we’ll keep watching it,” said Mr. Punzo, 44. “We’ve got our kayaks tied to the porch, and we’re ready to go.”
Their house is a couple of feet off the ground. The only time it has flooded was during Hurricane Katrina, he said, when three feet of river water filled the two-bedroom house.
The couple had sent three of their children to stay with relatives who are either on higher ground or who have brick homes. But the Punzos stayed, waking up happy that the storm had not caused major damage through the night.
“If it was a Category 3 we would have probably done left, but this isn’t going to be as bad as some we’ve seen,” Mr. Punzo said. “If you wasn’t from here you’d be scared, but for those of us who have been through it time and time and time again, this is like a doubled-up summer thunderstorm.”
Before the storm’s arrival on Tuesday, mandatory evacuations had been imposed in parts of eight parishes in Louisiana and in low-lying areas of Mississippi. The Red Cross had opened 19 shelters in Mississippi and Alabama and 18 in Louisiana.
In Alabama, extensive flooding is likely in Bayou La Batre, a town in Mobile County, as well as parts of downtown Mobile, according to the National Weather Service. Several of the rivers flowing into Mobile Bay are also expected to flood.
John Schwartz, Campbell Robertson and David Thier reported from New Orleans, and Kim Severson from Biloxi, Miss. Timothy Williams and Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York, and Jackie Calmes and John H. Cushman Jr. from Washington.
