The Gulf Coast Waits: Will It Be Another Katrina?

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Gustav charged toward the largely deserted coast of Louisiana early Monday and seemed destined to make landfall west of a city still recovering three years after Katrina's devastating blow.

The National Hurricane Center said Gustav packed winds near 115 mph as it steamed across the Gulf of Mexico on a path toward the central Louisiana coast, where landfall was expected by midday. Forecasters said the storm could strengthen before it comes ashore.

Nearly 2 million people heeded warnings and fled inland over the weekend in what officials called the largest evacuation in state history — a remarkable turnaround from 2005, when tens of thousands were stranded in New Orleans as Katrina's floodwaters rose.

"We've never had an evacuation this smooth, this early and this complete," said Gov. Bobby Jindal, who spent the night at the state's emergency operations center in Baton Rouge. "Now we ask people to be patient. The storm will decide the rest."

New Orleans was a ghost town by dawn. The French Quarter's bars and restaurants stood shuttered behind plywood, and police cruisers prowled empty intersections. Mayor Ray Nagin, who called Gustav "the mother of all storms," ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew and warned that looters would go straight to jail.

The anxiety was personal for the few who stayed. At the Napoleon House bar, one of the handful still open Sunday night, holdouts traded stories about Katrina and insisted the rebuilt levees would hold. "I can't go through another one," said a bartender boarding the windows. "If this one's bad, I'm gone for good."

The Army Corps of Engineers said the city's flood protection system — still years from completion — was in far better shape than three years ago, with gates at the mouths of the major drainage canals and pumps ready to run. But officials warned that a 12-to-16-foot storm surge could overtop levees on the city's west bank.

The storm's approach scrambled the opening of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., where party leaders stripped Monday's schedule to bare legal formalities. President Bush scrapped his planned speech and flew to Texas to monitor the response.

Gustav had already left a trail of destruction across the Caribbean, killing more than 80 people in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Cuba, where it tore roofs from homes and toppled power lines as a major hurricane Saturday.

Oil companies shut down nearly all production in the Gulf and evacuated thousands of platform workers, pushing crude prices up in overnight trading in Asia.

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Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

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