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August 31st, 2008
Posted: 11:07 PM ET
NEW ORLEANS (CNN) — Nearly all of the roughly 2 million people in the New Orleans area had cleared out ahead of Hurricane Gustav on Sunday night as the storm chugged toward a likely strike on the Louisiana coast. Road, rail and air links out of New Orleans began to close as the first storm bands began to strike the city. But more than 1.9 million people had fled the city and its surrounding parishes by Sunday night, and fewer than 10,000 people were thought to remain in New Orleans, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said, citing the city’s police chief. National Guard troops and police were still combing the city broadcasting evacuation messages in English, Vietnamese and Spanish, he said. And Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, the city’s emergency operations chief, said 18,000 residents without transportation on their own had been evacuated by government agencies — efforts that were stepped up after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Meanwhile, three years after their response to Katrina received widespread criticism, Bush administration officials scrambled to prepare for Gustav’s arrival. President Bush canceled plans to attend this week’s Republican National Convention in Minnesota, and GOP officials curtailed their plans for at least the first day of the event as the storm neared. At 11 p.m. ET, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center projected the storm would strike land southwest of New Orleans sometime Monday. The Category 3 storm was packing top winds of 115 mph (185 km/h), with hurricane-force winds extending about 70 miles from the eye. Gustav was centered about 220 miles (360 km) south-southeast of New Orleans, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported, and it was moving northwest across the central Gulf of Mexico at 16 mph. |
 
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