On the eve of the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which brought widespread devastation after the colossal failure of the system built to protect the city, New Orleans on Tuesday night once again found itself facing the impending arrival of a huge and deadly storm. Isaac was a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 80 miles per hour when it made landfall at 6:45 p.m. local time just southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River, about 95 miles from New Orleans, and then wobbled westward and back out over water. Around 11 p.m., it was about 75 miles southeast of New Orleans with the same sustained winds. The drenching and slow-moving storm was heading to the northwest and was projected to be about an hour southwest of New Orleans around 7 a.m. on Wednesday, with the peak of the surge hitting the wall at Lake Borgne between 1 and 6 a.m., the northern end of the city at Lake Pontchartrain between noon and 6 p.m., and the West Bank area near midnight. Federal officials warned again and again that the storm, which killed 29 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, would generate high seas, intense rain and serious flooding in coastal and inland areas for days. The hurricane will be the first test of the $14.5 billion, 133-mile ring of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps put in place after Hurricane Katrina by the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that built the defenses that failed this city catastrophically in 2005. After coming ashore on Tuesday, the storm's center was predicted to linger over Louisiana through Thursday morning, said Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center, possibly slowing further from the leisurely 8-m.p.h. pace of its advance. Forecasters continued to predict a potentially life-threatening coastal storm surge, already reported in some spots in Louisiana to be over 10 feet. Communities may be cut off for days, and flooding may result in “certain death" in areas outside the levees. “The hazards are beginning," Dr. Knabb said. “It is going to last a long time and affect a lot of people." “We are ready for this," said Tim Doody, the president of the regional levee board covering much of the New Orleans metropolitan area, which takes over the operation of the hurricane defenses once the corps has completed them. President Obama declared states of emergency in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi as the storm approached. “America will be there to help folks recover no matter what this storm brings," he said at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. “Because when disaster strikes, we're not Democrats or Republicans first, we are Americans first." In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced on Tuesday that about 4,200 members of the National Guard had been activated and that thousands of beds were available in shelters across the state.
