Hurricane Gustav: New Orleans Levees Beat Weakening Storm

The partially rebuilt levees in New Orleans have held against hurricane Gustav, but the authorities today warned of more storms to come after the storm weakened and veered to the west of the city.

Dramatic television footage showed waves being forced by 180kph winds over the tops of the flood defenses on the west side of the city, in an echo of Katrina in 2005. The hurricane made landfall near Cocodrie, a thinly populated town west of New Orleans, known for its fishing and oil industries.

Eight deaths were attributed to the storm in the US, but five of these were traffic related, including four people killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree.

A 27-year-old Lafayette man was killed when a tree fell on his home and an Abbeville couple died when a tree fell on a house in Baton Rouge.

The New Orleans sewerage system was damaged and hospitals were working with skeleton crews on backup power. Drinking water continued to flow in the city and the pumps kept working — two critical service failings that contributed to Katrina's high toll.

Sea level surges were limited to less than 3 meters (9ft) in some places. Katrina produced surges of 8 meters.

The city's eastern wall, breached in 2005, has been repaired by the army corps in a rebuilding program scheduled to last until 2012, but the western wall has yet to be reinforced because of a lack of funding.

The city's mayor, Ray Nagin, warned residents it was too early yet to return but said their homecoming was "only days away, not weeks".

He urged residents to "resist the temptation to say 'we're out of the woods'" and said heavy rainfall could still flood the city.

The authorities took pride in a massive evacuation effort that succeeded in persuading people to leave on buses and trains out. Almost 2 million people left coastal Louisiana, and only about 10,000 rode out the storm in New Orleans.

"I would not do a thing differently," Nagin said. "I'd probably call Gustav, instead of the mother of all storms, maybe the mother-in-law or the ugly sister of all storms."

Although New Orleans has so far been spared, Gustav devastated parts of Louisiana and Texas, destroying homes and flooding parts of the mostly rural, low-lying parishes.There are also threats from other storms developing in the Atlantic. Hurricane Hanna, strengthened today 65km north of the Bahamas and could hit the US later in the week.

Tropical storm Ike, the ninth of the season, is brewing up behind Hanna in the mid-Atlantic.

While Gustav failed to live up to the standards set by Katrina, it still left communal and political chaos in its wake. The first day of the Republican party convention in St Paul, Minnesota, was disrupted as John McCain and his advisers struggled to find the appropriate tone.

George Bush, who was criticized for negligent and insensitive handling of the Katrina crisis, canceled his planned speech to the convention and went instead to Texas.

At an emergency center in Austin, he acknowledged that planning for Gustav was an improvement over the events of 2005. "The coordination on this storm is a lot better than during Katrina," he said.