Hurricane Isaac Sits and Saturates Gulf Coast

By John Schwartz, Campbell Robertson, The New York Times

29 August 12

urricane Isaac hovered over the Gulf Coast on Wednesday morning, punishing southeast Louisiana with 80 mile per hour winds, heavy rains and the threat of calamitous flooding, as forecasters said the rain may not let up for days.

The hurricane, which made its second landfall early Wednesday, was essentially stationary just off the Louisiana coast, according to the National Weather Service, bringing with it the heightened risk of tornadoes and flash flooding hundreds of miles inland from Louisiana to Florida.

The longer the storm lingers, the more pressure it is putting on the levees and other flood-protection systems along the coast.

In Plaquemines Parish, about 95 miles from New Orleans and where the hurricane first made landfall, water "overtopped" a levee, causing extensive flooding, according to the National Weather Service.

The levee is not one of the large, federally maintained earthworks lining the Mississippi River, but a locally maintained levee some 8 feet high, and lower than the 12-foot surge that hit it, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers. The water is threatening people living along the east bank of the parish, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, who did not comply with the mandatory evacuation.

"Right now, we're trying to figure out where they actually are," said a state trooper, Russel Brueck, at the parish emergency operations center. "They're not actually in the body of water. They're just stuck."

In the early morning, as the hurricane trudged up into the bayous of southern Louisiana, the storm seemed to arrive in earnest here in New Orleans. Wind howled through the streets, blowing apart billboards, tugging down trees and flooding streets.

More than 400,000 residents of Louisiana were without power, nearly a third of them in New Orleans. They had nothing to do but wait, since Entergy, the utility, could not send workers to fix lines until winds were below 30 miles per hour.

After the storm made its first landfall on Tuesday just southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River at about 6:45 p.m., it 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 and it remained stalled for hours, with bands of wind and rain continuing to churn over an area stretching several hundred miles.

Around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, the storm began to move slowly north again, making a second landfall west of Port Fourchon, La. But it continues to make slow progress and "surge heights of 6 to 10 feet are still occurring along portions of the coast of Southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi," according to the National Hurricane Center.

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.

While the storm is nowhere near as powerful as Hurricane Katrina - which struck seven years ago Wednesday - its pounding driving rains and surging waves are lashing towns from east of Morgan City, La., to the Mississippi-Alabama border.

The Mississippi Gaming Commission ordered the 12 casinos along the coast to close.

Waters from the gulf pushed onto the coast through the night in Mississippi and Alabama where thousands had lost power and 60 m.p.h. winds knocked out transformers and stripped palm trees. Several inches of rain had fallen overnight, flooding parts of the small cities along the coast.

The authorities in Mississippi have reported making a number of rescues, including a family with a 6-month-old baby and a dog that had been living on a houseboat on the Pearl River near the Mississippi-Louisiana border.

Before the storm's arrival on Tuesday, mandatory evacuations had been imposed in parts of eight parishes in Louisiana and in low-lying areas of Mississippi. The Red Cross had opened 19 shelters in Mississippi and Alabama and 18 in Louisiana.

The storm's center is likely to linger over Louisiana through Thursday morning, said Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center.

Forecasters continued to predict a potentially life-threatening coastal storm surge, already reported in some spots in Louisiana to be over 10 feet.

At Shell Beach in Louisiana, a storm surge of 10.7 feet was reported, according to the National Hurricane Center. In Waveland, Miss., a surge of 7.5 feet was reported.

Communities may be cut off for days, and flooding may result in "certain death" in areas outside the levees. "The hazards are beginning," Mr. Knabb said. "It is going to last a long time and affect a lot of people."