Thousands Flee as Hurricane Closes In

Tens of thousands of people in New Orleans and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico began racing inland Saturday as the region braced for the second strike of Hurricane Katrina, which was turning into a commanding storm as it moved over warm water following its pass over Florida.

Officials said they expected the storm to strengthen before landfall, possibly becoming a Category 4 storm or even a rare Category 5 -- the highest category of hurricane, carrying winds of more than 155 mph and a storm surge of 18 feet.

Landfall was expected Monday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

As New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin urged an orderly evacuation of the area Saturday, he told residents: “This is not a test. This is the real deal.”

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour declared states of emergency, and Blanco asked President Bush to do the same to free up federal resources. By late afternoon, the president had -- and issued a statement urging residents to follow the evacuation advice of local officials.

The center issued a hurricane watch from the Alabama-Florida line to southern Louisiana -- including the metropolitan region of New Orleans, which is home to about 1.6 million people and could suffer catastrophically if struck directly by a major storm.

New Orleans is essentially a giant bowl hemmed in by water on all sides -- Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. Some of New Orleans is as much as 9 feet below sea level, and weather experts have said that a direct strike could overwhelm protective levees, leaving significant portions of the city under water.

“This could be the worst-case scenario,” said Ivor Van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Public Health Research Center, which has sought to warn residents for years of the potential damage that a major storm could bring.

“Computer models that we are running show that the surge levels in Lake Pontchartrain are going to be almost equivalent to the levee heights. Throw on top of that very violent wave action, and there is a high probability that we are going to flood a large part of the city.”

Compounding the city’s vulnerable geography, its buffer against storms -- marshlands along the coast -- has been eaten away in recent years. The equivalent of a football field’s worth of marsh is lost to open water every 38 minutes, according to state officials, due to a host of factors, including a maze of navigation canals that have been cut and dug to make way for industry and ranchers.

Meanwhile, surveys have suggested that as many as 300,000 people would decline to evacuate even faced with a major storm. Officials said they feared the state had grown complacent because several storms had threatened the region in recent years, only to miss -- including Ivan last year and Dennis last month.

But state officials said they were encouraged by early reports of residents leaving the area.

Traffic on Interstate 10 west of New Orleans was crawling, and enough people had fled New Orleans and low-lying coastal communities that traffic was picking up in Baton Rouge, 80 miles to the northwest. Storm refugees from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana had begun arriving at inland hotels.

“Everything that has happened in the last 12 hours is indicating that it’s heading this way,” said Mark Lambert, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.

“It is a credit to the citizens that they have put aside that predisposition not to evacuate and that they realize that this is a real threat.”

Last week, the storm was not seen as a threat to the Gulf Coast because it was headed toward the east coast of Florida.

But, although hurricanes typically feed off of water and lose steam over land, this one emerged on the other side of Florida in formidable condition -- after killing seven people -- and looked certain to strike a second time.

To facilitate evacuations from the coast, the state was preparing to take the unusual step of “contraflow,” Lambert said -- reversing the flow of traffic on major highways.

At 8 a.m. today, the Louisiana Superdome -- the 125-million-cubic-foot stadium typically used for major sporting events and conventions -- was scheduled to be opened as a shelter. Tami Frazier, a spokeswoman for the New Orleans mayor, said the Superdome should be seen as a “refuge of last resort” and should be used only by people with special needs, such as senior citizens or people with medical conditions.

New Orleans officials were roundly criticized last year, during Ivan’s near-miss, when they were slow to provide shelter for the city’s many homeless people and low-income families.

Several parishes to south and east of the city, as well as Grand Isle, Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island, were also evacuating. Several areas had issued mandatory evacuation orders.

The U.S. Coast Guard urged mariners to secure their vessels, remove hazardous cargo, double mooring lines and head to safety.

The Coast Guard noted that many drawbridges along the coast could be shut down in the wake of a storm, trapping boaters that had not prepared in time.

“You can always replace a boat; you cannot replace a life,” the Coast Guard said in a public warning.

Energy companies were evacuating workers from some offshore platforms and oil rigs.

Meanwhile, Florida continued to dig out from Katrina’s initial strike.

Workers with shovels, brooms and bulldozers cleared the shorefront road along Fort Lauderdale’s beach, which had been covered with several inches of sand deposited by Katrina’s winds.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in South Florida remained without power, and near the Miami Metrozoo in southern Miami-Dade County, people waited in a two-mile-long line for free ice and bottled water.

Staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg and staff researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.