Hurricane Gustav nears Louisiana

Hurricane Gustav hurtled toward collision with the Louisiana coast on Monday, bringing pounding rain, surging wind and the most direct threat to New Orleans since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Nearly 2 million people fled the Louisiana coast and more than 11 million residents in five U.S. states were braced for the impact from the fast-moving storm, which was expected to make landfall on Monday morning around New Orleans.

Oil companies shut down nearly all production in the energy-rich Gulf of Mexico, a region that normally pumps a quarter of U.S. oil output and 15 percent of its natural gas.

Gustav also took center stage in U.S. presidential politics as Republicans prepared to open their convention on Monday to nominate presidential candidate John McCain with a bare-bones program stripped of the usual pomp and circumstance.

By Sunday night, the streets of New Orleans were ghostly quiet after some 95 percent of the city's population responded to desperate calls by officials for a sweeping evacuation.

An estimated 1.9 million people had fled coastal areas. Only 10,000 people were believed to have stayed behind in New Orleans. Police and national guard troops patrolled the empty city as a curfew went into effect in a bid to prevent looting.

By early Monday the outer bands of the storm were nearing the coast and had kicked up strong, gusting winds south of the city that were expected to gather force through the morning.

The storm packed maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 kph), making it a Category 3 storm, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Forecasters said Gustav could still strengthen but said the hurricane was no longer expected to be a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.

Even so, a storm surge of up to 14 feet (4.3 metres) could threaten the same levees that failed during Hurricane Katrina. Federal officials say the levees protecting New Orleans are stronger now but still have gaps.

Hurricane Katrina brought a 28-foot (8.5 metre) storm surge that burst levees on Aug. 29, 2005. New Orleans degenerated into chaos as stranded storm victims waited days for government rescue and law and order collapsed.

Gustav was expected to swamp parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas with up to 12 inches of rain and could spin off isolated tornadoes, forecasters said.

Centered some 170 miles (275 km) offshore, southeast of New Orleans, Gustav was rumbling toward the Louisiana coast at a 16 mile-per-hour (26 km-per-hour) pace as of 1 a.m. EDT (0500 GMT).

The approach of the storm stirred uneasy comparisons to Katrina which flooded some 80 percent of New Orleans, killed some 1,500 people in five states and cost near $80 billion.

President George W. Bush, who was criticized for the slow relief efforts after Katrina, canceled his appearance at the Republican convention as scheduled instead a visit to Texas on Monday to oversee emergency response effort.

McCain headed to the Gulf to survey preparations and ordered political speeches canceled on Monday for his nominating convention.

Fearing televised images of a choreographed Republican celebration would be seen as out of touch, McCain's campaign sought to distance itself from the botched response to Katrina's chaos almost exactly three years ago.

In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew, warning looters they would be sent straight to jail.

'A BIG, UGLY STORM'

Long lines of cars and buses streamed out of New Orleans on Sunday after Nagin ordered an evacuation of the city of 239,000 and told residents, "This is still a big, ugly storm, still strong and I encourage everyone to leave."

New Orleans resident Vanessa Jones, 50, said she had planned to stay but changed her mind after watching the news all night. "I can't take a chance because so many people died in Katrina," she said as she prepared to board a bus headed to an unknown destination.

The government lined up trains and hundreds of buses to evacuate 30,000 people who could not leave on their own and Nagin said 15,000 had been removed from the city, including hundreds in wheelchairs.

Flights from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities were canceled on Monday as the storm bore down on the region.

Residents boarded up the windows of their shops and homes before leaving town, while others hunkered down as "hold-outs" with stockpiled food, water and shotguns to ward off looters.

"I saw quite a bit of looting last time with Katrina, even 30 minutes after the winds had stopped," said construction contractor Norwood Thornton, who opted to stay behind to protect his home in New Orleans' historic Garden District.

Gustav weakened to a still-dangerous Category 3 storm after it passed over Cuba. It killed at least 86 people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.

The U.S. Coast Guard reported the first storm-related death in Florida on Sunday, where a man fell overboard as his craft ran into heavy waves.

Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which followed it three weeks later, wrecked more than 100 Gulf oil platforms, but Gustav could deal a harsher blow. [ID:nN30472395]

In a special trading session to accommodate the Labor Day holiday and the storm's impact, U.S. crude oil features on Sunday rose nearly $3 to over $118 per barrel.

"It remains likely that Gustav will prove to become a worst case scenario for the producing region and places the heart of the oil production region under a high risk of sustaining significant or major damage," said Planalytics analyst Jim Roullier.