Rising wind and driving rain lashed the US Gulf coast yesterday as hurricane Georges moved closer to shore, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate the region.
The storm, with winds of up to 110 mph churned in the Gulf of Mexico just 95 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River in south-east Louisiana and 190 miles south-east of New Orleans.
Although no serious injuries or deaths have been reported in the US, at least 298 people died as the hurricane rampaged through the Caribbean over the past week.
Georges was expected to make landfall last night, the National Hurricane Centre in Miami said, but winds of up to 50 mph were already affecting coastal cities from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle.
The National Hurricane Centre warned that up to 20 inches of rain were likely, along with a storm surge of 15 ft. The combination was expected to bring heavy flooding along the coast. A hurricane warning was in effect from Morgan City, Louisiana to Panama City, Florida.
In Port Sulphur, Louisiana, near where the storm was expected to make landfall, the sheriff's deputy said: "I hope everybody who needed to get out is gone. It's blowing really hard but no rain yet. I wish we were gone too."
Georges swept through the Florida Keys on Friday after raking island after island in the Caribbean where about 300 people died in the storm. It was moving at about 10 mph as it travelled north-west through the gulf yesterday.
The weather was still calm in New Orleans yesterday morning, but the city was ready for what the National Weather Service described as "a major threat to life and property".
The normally lively French Quarter was all but abandoned and many of its stores and restaurants were boarded up. New Orleans officials on Saturday called for a voluntary evacuation of residents living inside hurricane protection levees and a mandatory evacuation of those living outside the defensive embankments.
City crews sandbagged bridges and streets and they closed floodgates in levees that surround the low-lying city.
The New Orleans mayor, Mr Marc Morial, warned city residents that Georges would strike a hard blow.
"This is nothing to play with. It's a powerful force of nature," he said. Mr Morial said he would probably order a mandatory curfew later in the day to make sure people stayed inside.
The New Orleans airport shut down early yesterday, well ahead of the storm's arrival.
Georges is one of four hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, a rare meteorological event not seen since the last century. The others, Ivan, Jeanne and Karl, are all spinning harmlessly in the ocean, posing no threat to the US mainland.