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Isaac’s Winds Slow, but Its Rains Put Wide Area at Risk Isaac’s Winds Slow, but Its Rains Put Wide Area at Risk
(about 4 hours later)
NEW ORLEANS — Tropical Storm Isaac’s once fierce winds slowed to 40 miles per hour on Thursday as it finally moved out of southern Louisiana and headed north while continuing to bring heavy rains and flooding along its path. BATON ROUGE, La. — Tropical Depression Isaac, weakening from tropical storm status as it made its way across land, continued to cause problems across Louisiana and Mississippi on Thursday.
The storm continued at its now familiar exceedingly slow pace — 9 m.p.h. — as it moved into central Louisiana and on toward Arkansas, which it may not reach until some time Friday, forecasters said. The torrential rains will now move into Arkansas and parts of the Midwest that have suffered through the summer with far too little water, not too much of it.
At 1 p.m., the vastly weakened system was 25 miles southwest of Monroe, La. — and more than 165 miles northwest of a New Orleans glad to see it gone. As New Orleans breathed a sigh of relief over the $14.5 billion in levee defenses that now ring the city, other parts of the state without such protections were not so lucky. The storm’s surge caused water to rise nine feet on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, flooding towns like Slidell; west of the lake, the waters inundated LaPlace and the surrounding area. Emergency crews tried to take dangerous pressure off a weakened dam on Lake Tangipahoa in Mississippi and to release penned-up water in the drenched communities of Plaquemines Parish southeast of New Orleans.
The storm however, continued to create major problems in a wide area of the Gulf Coast on Thursday. Federal officials warned that the storm’s risks were not past. “Whether a community is beginning the cleanup process, or still feeling the effects of Isaac, residents still need to be alert to the dangers that remain,” said W. Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “This is still a powerful storm and there are a number of areas both along the coast and inland that can be affected by strong winds, storm surge and inland flooding and tornadoes.”
Louisiana officials ordered an evacuation for some 60,000 people living in communities along the rain-swollen Tangipahoa River after warning that the Tangipahoa Dam in Mississippi was in danger of failing. During a morning news conference in Baton Rouge, Gov. Bobby Jindal said that more than 6,000 people had registered in shelters around the state, and more than 3,000 people were taken out of St. John the Baptist Parish alone.
After observing the dam from a helicopter on Thursday afternoon, Gov. Bobby Jindal told Louisiana residents living within half-a-mile of the river to leave and to “stay evacuated until the river crests.” As for the locally operated levee on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish, “it appears that the levee has held,” the governor said, adding that “the worst fears did not come true.”
“There are a couple of areas that look like they are under significant stress,” he said. At the east bank community of Braithwaite, floodwaters stood at eight feet in some areas, trapped within the local levees. The water level had dropped from a height of 14 feet, the Army Corps of Engineers estimated. The state drained off several feet, allowing some water to flow back into the Mississippi River through the Caernarvon diversion, a coastal restoration structure that normally sends fresh water and sediment from the Mississippi into the coastal bays and marshes of the Breton Sound.
At least publicly, Mississippi officials were being more circumspect. On Thursday afternoon, work crews cut a notch in the parish-built levee to allow the water to flow out. “We anticipate we will be able to drain up to 70 percent of the water from the inundated area within a 24-hour period,” said Olivia Watkins, a spokeswoman for the state’s coastal protection and restoration authority.
In Pike County, for instance, they called only for a “precautionary evacuation” of the area of the county south of 700-acre Lake Tangipahoa. The rest of the water, she said, will be removed with diesel pumps that had been trucked in.
In a statement, Pike County said “the dam has been badly damaged by heavy rains,” but it had not been breached. In Mississippi, state workers tried to take water pressure off a rain-weakened Percy Quin dam at Lake Tangipahoa. A collapse of the dam could have caused a surge of water into the Tangipahoa River, which has flooded badly in years past and was already running high on Thursday because of the storm’s rainfall.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency also said that the dam was in no immediate danger. Tangipahoa Parish stretches down from the Mississippi state line to Lake Pontchartrain, and other than the city of Hammond consists largely of small towns and pastureland. Most of these towns lie just west of the Tangipahoa River. The parish has grown quickly in the years since Hurricane Katrina, as southern Louisianans moved north, but those who have been around a while are used to flooding.
“There’s no water coming through it,” said Greg Flynn, a spokesman for the agency. “There hasn’t been a breach.” “Folks that live here know better than anyone else, they know where the water went in 1983, they know where the water went in 1990,” Governor Jindal said in a briefing at the Tangipahoa emergency operations center in Amite City, La.
Mr. Flynn said that even if the dam did fail, however, only about 12 homes would be threatened by floodwaters. “It’s a very sparsely populated area,” he said. The controlled release of water was intended to take pressure off the dam, but was not expected to substantially raise the level of the river. The release will affect “about 20 homes,” said Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for Governor Jindal’s emergency office, but will reduce the threat to the larger population along the river.
But Mr. Jindal warned that The collapse of the dam could have been devastating, and Louisiana officials ordered an evacuation of tens of thousands of people who live within half a mile of the river. Were the dam to burst, all of the village of Tangipahoa (population 1,200) would be underwater, said Michael Jackson, the mayor. He estimated that 85 percent of the residents had left for shelters in Kentwood or to stay with relatives. The village had flooded this time last year, just because of a bad rainstorm, so people knew their risks.
if the dam failed, it would take only 90 minutes for floodwaters to reach the town of Kentwood — hometown of Britney Spears — downstream. To many of those packing up, this was just an unfortunate but inevitable part of living in a floodplain.“You see, this is swamp,” said T. J. Ockman, 65, who lives not far from the river. His mobile home sits on stilts up on a hill and he does not think it should flood. Still, he was making trips back and forth between his trailer and his pickup truck, clomping up the stairs in his white shrimp boots, packing up his three dogs and a generator. “I’m no fool,” he said. “I was raised around the bayou. I’ve been through a few storms. I know from water.”
“They are planning a planned breach of the dam to prevent the dam from breaking,” he said, adding that an unplanned breach could cause the kind of river flooding that occurred in 1983 and 1990. In Slidell, La., a city of about 30,000 people on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain, floodwaters from creeks flowing into the area’s bayous inundated Olde Towne, a residential area and tourist destination, and Mayor Freddy Drennan encouraged residents in several neighborhoods to evacuate.
The 1990 flood, Mr. Jindal said, “was actually bad enough to take out some bridges.” Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, Jay Dardenne, said that workers in state parks in St. Tammany Parish told him “there is more water than we saw in Katrina.”
“You would see that kind of impact again,” he said, adding, “there are many more people living in those areas” now. At a junior high school in Slidell that served as a Red Cross shelter for the parish, the volunteer in charge, Ed Harris, had to go back to his own home to rescue his wife, Jeanie. “I got a text yesterday from her, she was scared. We’d gone through Katrina.” He went to pick her up, his truck pushing through the rising water. Now she was one of the 160 or so evacuees to join him at the shelter. They still did not know what happened to the house.
But if a planned breach takes place, Mr. Jindal said, there would be no impact expected in Louisiana. At the Baton Rouge news conference, Mr. Jindal said that the success of the New Orleans hurricane defenses would send a message. “If the proper flood protection systems are built, we can protect our people and our communities,” he said.
The governor said there were six nursing homes in the area, but only two would have to be evacuated and that the local hospitals and a prison would not have to be cleared. The investment around New Orleans pays off for all Americans, he said: “Protecting the Louisiana coast is good for Louisiana — it’s also good for this country” because of the importance of the seafood that comes from commercial fishing and the energy and taxes. “It’s a good investment for the country to be making,” he said. “It’s investing in the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.”
The storm — which had been a Category 1 hurricane — pummeled much of the Gulf Coast, pinning portions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama under a saturating rainfall and creating 12-foot storm surges.

John Schwartz reported from Baton Rouge, La., and Campbell Robertson from Amite City, La. David Their contributed reporting from Plaquemines Parish, La.

In Slidell, La., a city of about 30,000 people on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain, floodwaters from creeks flowing into the area’s bayous have begun to inundate Olde Towne, a residential area and tourist destination, and Mayor Freddy Drennan encouraged residents in several neighborhoods to evacuate.
“Water is currently backing up into the city through Bayou Pattasat,” Mayor Drennan said on the city’s Facebook page Thursday morning. “The water levels in Bayou Bonfouca got so high that it has gone around the pump stations into Bayou Bonfouca and back up into Slidell through that natural drain. The pumps are currently unable to pump the water out as fast as it’s coming in.”
In Biloxi, Miss., on Thursday morning, residents had hoped that the day could be spent cleaning up and assessing damage. Instead, winds were still blowing strong and heavy rain was still falling.
Gale-force winds pushed water at the mouth of the Biloxi River, and prevented it from draining. In some sections, the river was overflowing its banks.
Schools and government offices remained closed. And after a couple days without electricity, some people’s food supplies were running low. Ice was nowhere to be found.
Resort beach hotels that had been empty save for a few evacuees prepared for insurance adjusters, federal emergency workers and crews from retail stores like Home Depot, which was scheduled to send nearly 300 employees to the region to get stores open and ready for a booming business in plywood, sheet rock and tarps.
“The first thing you go after when a storm like this is over is food and repair material,” said Kent Wagner, a human resource manager for Home Depot.
The only confirmed fatality linked to the storm so far was the death of a tow truck driver in Pearl County, Miss., who was killed when a tree fell on his cab, said the county coroner, Derek Turnage.
In New Orleans, the decision by most residents to stay did not turn out to be disastrous. On Thursday, despite pouring rain, people began to venture out after being cooped up for the better part of two days without electricity. Some had come outside to walk dogs, though many others were lining up at gas stations and corner stores.
The city’s wounds, however, appeared to be rather modest: street flooding, nonfunctional traffic lights, large, uprooted oak trees blocking roads. Cars in dealerships along Interstate 10 had floodwater halfway up their tires.
Some people, unsure of the availability of fuel and about the extent of road access, took to their bicycles.
Still, three-quarters of the city was without power, and will be for several days. In all, hundreds of thousands of people across the state do not have electricity, though in a sign that help is on the way, a convoy of utility vehicles was seen Thursday morning heading toward the city from Michigan — via Interstate 10 in Mississippi.
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.
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 this storm and Hurricane Katrina first made landfall.
Fears that a locally built gulf-side levee would be overtopped by the storm’s massive surge were well founded. Many of those on Plaquemines Parish’s east bank who ignored Monday’s order to leave were forced into their attics when the levee was overtopped and the gulf poured in, filling up a bowl between levees with as much as 14 feet of water.
On Thursday, Mr. Jindal said 141 people had been rescued in Plaquemines Parish by the National Guard, private individuals and others, and that more than 100 people had been evacuated from the Riverbend nursing home in Belle Chasse.
As for a parish-operated levee on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish, Mr. Jindal said it appeared to have held,
There was “overlapping, but not overtopping,” which means that while waves splashed over the levee, there was not the continuous stream of water that can destroy a levee. “The worst fears did not come true,” Mr. Jindal said.
More than 6,000 people were in shelters across the state and 5,000 members of the National Guard had been deployed to help in response efforts.

Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Kim Severson from Biloxi, Miss. David Thier contributed reporting from Plaquemines Parish, La., John Schwartz from New Orleans, Timothy Williams, Christine Hauser and Lori Moore from New York. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.