Gustav Was No Katrina, but Next Time ...

From the triumphant tone of some public statements and news coverage after Gustav passed through, it would be easy to think that the upgraded hurricane protection system in New Orleans had passed its first big test and that it’s all bon temps from here.

But complacency is as big a threat as wind and storm surge to a city that still has a long way to go — especially in light of rising oceans and a subsiding landscape.

Gustav had looked like a monster on its way toward land. On Saturday, Aug. 30, the National Hurricane Center described Gustav as an “extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane” that could become a Category 5, and was on a track that would take it slightly to the west of New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered an evacuation for what he called “the mother of all storms,” and an estimated two million people got out of southern Louisiana before the storm hit on Monday.

By landfall on Monday morning, however Gustav had weakened considerably and its track had slipped a bit farther west. The impact on New Orleans was blessedly slight.

Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers, said last week that good news about the storm could leave officials who had urged evacuation open to criticism of crying wolf — the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum that comes with any hurricane. “I would hope this wouldn’t cause people to say, ‘next time, we’re not going,’ ” he said. “You were taking a real gamble if you don’t do exactly what people did.”

After all, he said, “what if the track had been 30 miles different and had gone east? And it could have.” When it comes to evacuations, better safe than sorry, the general said. “That was a big lesson of Katrina.”

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