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Local crews help with outages
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| (AP Photo) Large pieces of brick from a building in downtown Gulfport, Miss., which was damaged three years ago by Hurricane Katrina, is knocked down by winds from Hurricane Gustav Monday. |
About 1 million without power due to hurricane
By Robert Lee Long,
Community Editor
MCCOMB — Hurricane Gustav delivered a powerful punch to the Gulf Coast Monday as local volunteers pitched in to help with the storm’s aftermath.
DeSoto County’s Pat Nelson, customer service representative for Entergy, was hunkered down in Entergy’s McComb headquarters to ride out Gustav, a Category 3 storm that slammed ashore around 10 a.m. just south of Houma, La. Monday.
So far, it appears that damage was far less than Hurricane Katrina inflicted three years ago. Far fewer deaths and injuries were also reported.
“We’re still holding some folks back until it looks like we are in the clear,” Nelson said. “We have a large contingent from North Mississippi in McComb.
Nelson said 9,000 restoration workers were en route to the area affected by the hurricane from Arkansas and points north who stopped for meals in Horn Lake and then went down I-55 to Jackson where they stopped for processing Sunday afternoon.
Nelson said a total of 735,000 were without power in Louisiana Sunday afternoon. More than 108,000 Entergy customers in New Orleans were in the dark. In Mississippi, only 15,579 people were without power, according to Nelson. Of that number, 9,600 residents of McComb and Brookhaven lost power and 4,221 Entergy customers in Natchez were without electricity.
“The strongest threat that we have in Mississippi are tornadoes spawned by the hurricane,” Nelson said. “Most of the damage was south of Jackson. The eye of the storm thankfully passed to the west of us.”
However, Nelson said the extent of the damage might not be known for days to come.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie, a low-lying community in Louisiana’s Cajun country 72 miles southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm on a scale of 1 to 5. The storm weakened to a Category 1 later in the afternoon. Forecasters feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.
As of Monday evening, the extent of the damage in the bayou country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.
The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half-century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors - oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams - have destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.
Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike. The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half the nation’s refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output. But oil prices actually tumbled to $111 a barrel as the storm weakened.
The nation was nervously watching to see how New Orleans would deal with Gustav almost exactly three years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed roughly 1,600 people. Federal, state and local officials took a never-again stance after Katrina and set to work planning and upgrading flood defenses in the below-sea-level city.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had cartons of food, water, blankets and other supplies to sustain 1 million people for three days ready to be distributed Monday - a contrast to Katrina, when thousands waited for rescue in a hot Superdome.
“With Katrina they didn’t come and rescue us until the next day,” said LaTriste Washington, 32, who stayed in her home during the 2005 hurricane and later was rescued by boat. She was in a shelter in Birmingham, Ala., Monday. “This time they were ready and had buses lined up for us to leave New Orleans.”
President Bush, who skipped the Republican convention to monitor the storm from Texas, applauded the preparation and response efforts.
“The coordination on this storm is a lot better than on - than during Katrina,” Bush said noting how the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had been working in concert. “It was clearly a spirit of sharing assets, of listening to somebody’s problems and saying, ‘How can we best address them?’”
For all their apparent similarities, Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina were different in one critical respect: Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, a far higher wall of water than Gustav hauled ashore.
Katrina was a bigger storm when it came ashore in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm and it made a direct hit on the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Gustav skirted along Louisiana’s shoreline at “a more gentle angle,” said National Weather Service storm surge specialist Will Shaffer.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s emergency preparedness director, Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, said residents might be allowed to return 24 hours after the tropical storm-force winds die down.
Other evacuated areas along the coast may be away from home for longer, said National Hurricane Center director Bill Read. The hurricane will likely slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly Arkansas, and those areas could then get 20 inches of rainfall.
Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
In Mississippi, officials said a 15-foot storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns devastated by Katrina. Officials said at least three people near the Jordan River had to be rescued from the floodwaters. Elsewhere in the state, an abandoned building in Gulfport collapsed and a few homes in Biloxi were flooded.
The ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Biloxi’s casino row was flooded during the storm surge from Gustav. Hurricane Katrina smashed the casino three years ago shortly before it was to open.
Bobby Tuber, the casino’s facility-grounds manager, said the storm put about 30 inches of water in the building but the casino itself, located on an upper level, and was not damaged.
“We’re fine. We’ll come out all well,” Tuber said as he and others used a pump and a large hose to remove the water.
Gustav was the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth grew into Hurricane Hanna Monday, followed quickly by the formation of Tropical Storm Ike a few hours later. Forecasters said it could come ashore in Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.
Robert Lee Long can be contacted at rlong@desototimes.com or at (662) 429-NEWS, Ext. 252.
(The Associated Press contributed to this story)
DeSoto County’s Pat Nelson, customer service representative for Entergy, was hunkered down in Entergy’s McComb headquarters to ride out Gustav, a Category 3 storm that slammed ashore around 10 a.m. just south of Houma, La. Monday.
So far, it appears that damage was far less than Hurricane Katrina inflicted three years ago. Far fewer deaths and injuries were also reported.
“We’re still holding some folks back until it looks like we are in the clear,” Nelson said. “We have a large contingent from North Mississippi in McComb.
Nelson said 9,000 restoration workers were en route to the area affected by the hurricane from Arkansas and points north who stopped for meals in Horn Lake and then went down I-55 to Jackson where they stopped for processing Sunday afternoon.
Nelson said a total of 735,000 were without power in Louisiana Sunday afternoon. More than 108,000 Entergy customers in New Orleans were in the dark. In Mississippi, only 15,579 people were without power, according to Nelson. Of that number, 9,600 residents of McComb and Brookhaven lost power and 4,221 Entergy customers in Natchez were without electricity.
“The strongest threat that we have in Mississippi are tornadoes spawned by the hurricane,” Nelson said. “Most of the damage was south of Jackson. The eye of the storm thankfully passed to the west of us.”
However, Nelson said the extent of the damage might not be known for days to come.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie, a low-lying community in Louisiana’s Cajun country 72 miles southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 storm on a scale of 1 to 5. The storm weakened to a Category 1 later in the afternoon. Forecasters feared the storm would arrive as a devastating Category 4.
As of Monday evening, the extent of the damage in the bayou country was not immediately clear. State officials said they had still not reached anyone at Port Fourchon, a vital hub for the energy industry where huge amounts of oil and gas are piped inland to refineries. The eye of Gustav passed about 20 miles from the port and there were fears the damage there could be extensive.
The storm could prove devastating to the region of fishing villages and oil-and-gas towns. For most of the past half-century, the bayou communities have watched their land disappear at one of the highest rates of erosion in the world. A combination of factors - oil drilling, hurricanes, levees, dams - have destroyed the swamps and left the area with virtually no natural buffer against storms.
Damage to refineries and drilling platforms could cause gasoline prices at the pump to spike. The Gulf Coast is home to nearly half the nation’s refining capacity, while offshore the Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output. But oil prices actually tumbled to $111 a barrel as the storm weakened.
The nation was nervously watching to see how New Orleans would deal with Gustav almost exactly three years after Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed roughly 1,600 people. Federal, state and local officials took a never-again stance after Katrina and set to work planning and upgrading flood defenses in the below-sea-level city.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had cartons of food, water, blankets and other supplies to sustain 1 million people for three days ready to be distributed Monday - a contrast to Katrina, when thousands waited for rescue in a hot Superdome.
“With Katrina they didn’t come and rescue us until the next day,” said LaTriste Washington, 32, who stayed in her home during the 2005 hurricane and later was rescued by boat. She was in a shelter in Birmingham, Ala., Monday. “This time they were ready and had buses lined up for us to leave New Orleans.”
President Bush, who skipped the Republican convention to monitor the storm from Texas, applauded the preparation and response efforts.
“The coordination on this storm is a lot better than on - than during Katrina,” Bush said noting how the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had been working in concert. “It was clearly a spirit of sharing assets, of listening to somebody’s problems and saying, ‘How can we best address them?’”
For all their apparent similarities, Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina were different in one critical respect: Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast with an epic storm surge that topped 27 feet, a far higher wall of water than Gustav hauled ashore.
Katrina was a bigger storm when it came ashore in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm and it made a direct hit on the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Gustav skirted along Louisiana’s shoreline at “a more gentle angle,” said National Weather Service storm surge specialist Will Shaffer.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s emergency preparedness director, Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, said residents might be allowed to return 24 hours after the tropical storm-force winds die down.
Other evacuated areas along the coast may be away from home for longer, said National Hurricane Center director Bill Read. The hurricane will likely slow down as it heads into Texas and possibly Arkansas, and those areas could then get 20 inches of rainfall.
Only one storm-related death, a woman killed in a car wreck driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, was reported in Louisiana. Before arriving in the U.S., Gustav was blamed for at least 94 deaths in the Caribbean.
In Mississippi, officials said a 15-foot storm surge flooded homes and inundated the only highways to coastal towns devastated by Katrina. Officials said at least three people near the Jordan River had to be rescued from the floodwaters. Elsewhere in the state, an abandoned building in Gulfport collapsed and a few homes in Biloxi were flooded.
The ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Biloxi’s casino row was flooded during the storm surge from Gustav. Hurricane Katrina smashed the casino three years ago shortly before it was to open.
Bobby Tuber, the casino’s facility-grounds manager, said the storm put about 30 inches of water in the building but the casino itself, located on an upper level, and was not damaged.
“We’re fine. We’ll come out all well,” Tuber said as he and others used a pump and a large hose to remove the water.
Gustav was the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. The eighth grew into Hurricane Hanna Monday, followed quickly by the formation of Tropical Storm Ike a few hours later. Forecasters said it could come ashore in Georgia and South Carolina late in the week.
Robert Lee Long can be contacted at rlong@desototimes.com or at (662) 429-NEWS, Ext. 252.
(The Associated Press contributed to this story)
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