As Hurricane Gustav moved relentlessly across the Gulf of Mexico on its way to an expected landfall near the city of New Orleans on Monday, more than a million people, many of them victims of the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina three years ago, crammed the highways in flight, and the city's mayor urged people to get out of town to escape the “storm of the century.” Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, flooding New Orleans, killing 1,800 people and causing $80 billion in damage. Gustav likely to pick up speed and hit the coast harder than Katrina as a massive Category 4 hurricane will bring with it storm surges of more than 18 to 25 feet above normal tide levels which will wash over many of the city's levees and sorely test those that have been recently reinforced. Apart for its potential to destroy life and property, Gustav is also a political hurricane. It will hit the US coast at exactly the same time that the Republican National Convention opens in St. Paul, Minnesota to nominate Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin as respectively the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees. With the bitter memory of how the Bush Administration waited too long to address the Katrina tragedy in mind, Republican Convention plans are in tatters. Bush who is scheduled to address the Convention on Monday night likely will not do so, and McCain and Palin have curtailed their campaigning to go to Mississippi to inspect preparations for Gustav's arrival. Nearly a quarter of US crude oil installations are located in Gustav's path and major oil producers have already evacuated their workers from facilities in the Gulf. The economic cost could be enormous. The destruction of one major deep-water oil production platform brings with it a loss of more than a billion dollars. As one oil engineer said, “If it's multiple rigs and platforms in a variety of water depths, then we're talking billions of dollars.” With convoys of ambulances entering New Orleans and with 1,500 New Orleans police officers and more than 2,000 National Guard troops scheduled to protect against looting and crime, Gustav is like a nightmare revisited upon a city whose physical and psychological scars have not yet healed. Imprinted on people's minds is the terror and destruction of three years ago and the suffering of the aftermath of Katrina. And now they have to go through it all again. As one woman said, “People are frightened.”
