NEW ORLEANS (AP) – University authorities expect classes to commence on-campus starting Monday, Sept. 8, according to the Loyola Web site updated today at 4:22 p.m. Although prior to the storm the date of return had been scheduled for Thursday; the Office of Public Relations said the Emergency Response Team awaited further verification of levee safety levels. Students are expected to continue classes online via BlackBoard through this Friday. An emergency response team will meet tomorrow to assess the earliest possible date for faculty and students to safely return.
Loyola’s Director of Public Affairs Meredith Hartley said the campus has not incurred any damages. The Times Picayune reported today that the Uptown area received minimal damage from the storm.
Wind-driven water sloshed over the top of the Industrial Canal’s floodwall, but city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers said they expected the levees, still only partially rebuilt after Katrina, would hold. Flood protections along the canal broke with disastrous effect during Katrina, submerging St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward.
While New Orleans wasn’t submerged, there were scores of homes that suffered damage. More than 500,000 customers were without power. In Terrebonne Parish, located in the southeast part of the state, several homes had torn roofs, but winds were still too fierce for officials to fan out and assess how bad the damage was.
In the Upper Ninth Ward, about half the streets closest to the canal were flooded with ankle- to knee-deep water as the road dipped and rose. Of more immediate concern to authorities were two small vessels that broke loose from their moorings in the canal and were resting against the Florida Street wharf.
By mid afternoon Monday, the rain had stopped in the French Quarter, the highest point in the city. The wind was breezy but not fierce, and some of the approximately 10,000 people who chose to defy warnings and stay behind began to emerge. But knowing that the levees surrounding the city could still be pressured by rising waters, no one was celebrating just yet.
“I don’t think we’re out of the woods. We still have to worry about the water,” said Gerald Boulmay, 61, a St. Louis Hotel worker and lifelong New Orleans resident.
Mayor Ray Nagin said the city didn’t yet know if the vulnerable West Bank would stay dry. Worries about the level of flood protection in an area where enhancements to the levees are years from completion were a key reason Nagin was so insistent residents evacuate the city.
The storm surge in the Industrial Canal on the east side of the city reached 12 feet – the same height as the lowest wall. Officials monitoring the flood protection system relaxed, then turned their concern to the West Bank, where waters could still rise and pressure incomplete levees over the next day as the storm blusters inland.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to, like, break,” said resident Renee Gilmore, who surveyed her neighborhood near the canal before joining friends for an impromptu neighborhood party.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 9:30 a.m. near Cocodrie (pronounced ko-ko-DREE), 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 noon, the extent of the damage in Cajun 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.
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.
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.
___
Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer, Janet McConnaughey, Robert Tanner, Cain Burdeau, Alan Sayre, and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report from New Orleans. Vicki Smith in Boutte and Doug Simpson in Baton Rouge also contributed. Michael Kunzelman reported from Lafayette, Jay Reeves reported from Orange Beach, La. and Holbrook Mohr contributed from Gulfport, Miss. Juanita Cousins reported from Birmingham, Ala.
