With the first clouds from Hurricane Gustav moving in, Interstate 10 in New Orleans was almost completely empty by midday Sunday. Most residents planning to leave apparently had done so since the highway had been packed earlier.
NEW ORLEANS - The Big Easy and other Louisiana coastal areas increasingly took on the eeriness of ghost towns Sunday as most residents heeded a mandatory evacuation order, and police and National Guard troops clamped down to prevent the kind of lawlessness and chaos that followed Katrina three years ago.
Col. Mike Edmondson, chief of the Louisiana State Police, said he believed over 90 percent of the coastal Louisiana population had fled — the largest evacuation in state history.
Large areas of southeast Louisiana, including sections in the greater New Orleans area, that are protected by levees face being flooding by several feet of water, according to Gustav surge models. Gustav appears likely to overwhelm the system of levees west of the city that have for decades been under-funded and neglected even as the population has grown.
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