NEW ORLEANS appeared yesterday to have been narrowly spared a repeat of the devastation of Katrina three years ago when Hurricane Gustav weakened and veered to the west of the city as it made landfall.
The hurricane was categorised down from force three to two just before it hit land near Cocodrie, a thinly-populated town west of New Orleans, known for its fishing and oil industries. Dramatic television footage showed waves being forced by winds of up to 176km/h over the tops of the flood defences on the west side of the city, in a worrying echo of 2005.
Power supplies were cut to large parts of New Orleans as fallen trees struck electricity lines and flattened several homes. But sea level surges were mercifully limited to less than three metres in some places, markedly less than the eight metres of Katrina.
As New Orleans heaved a sigh of relief, towns to the west, such as Lafayette and Baton Rouge, remained imperilled. Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's governor, warned that cataclysmic flooding could still be brought by the tail end of the hurricane.
While Gustav failed to live up to the terrifying standards set by Katrina, it still left communal and political chaos in its wake. Almost two million people fled the Gulf of Mexico, the largest evacuation of its kind, turning New Orleans and other coastal communities into virtual ghost towns.
Republicans meeting in St Paul turned the first day of their national convention into a fundraiser for victims of the hurricane, as party officials waited to decide how the storm would affect the rest of the week's events.
Senior Republicans remained confident that John McCain would accept his party's presidential nomination in St Paul on Thursday, but party chairman Mike Duncan said the convention schedule would be decided on a day-by-day basis. "We don't know yet the impact of this storm," he said. "We'll conduct our convention depending on what happens."
The convention opened yesterday with two hours of procedural business, followed by brief appeals by first lady Laura Bush and Mr McCain's wife, Cindy, for delegates to support disaster relief efforts on the Gulf coast.
Mr McCain visited a disaster relief centre in Ohio yesterday, helping to pack cleaning supplies and other items into plastic buckets that will be sent to storm-hit communities.
George Bush, whose handling of Katrina was criticised for being negligent and insensitive, cancelled his planned speech to the convention and travelled instead to Texas.
At an emergency centre in Austin, Texas, he acknowledged that planning for Gustav was an improvement over the events of 2005. "The co-ordination on this storm is a lot better than on - than during Katrina," he said.
About 1,600 people died in Katrina. The lack of advance planning in 2005 and the sluggish federal response by the Bush administration has gone down in history as one of America's most shameful moments.
By contrast federal and local governments were quick this year to put emergency plans in place. Fema, the federal emergency management agency criticised for its handling of Katrina, this time put into action a five-day plan that saw almost 90 per cent of the region evacuated.
New Orleans enacted a dawn-to-dusk curfew designed to prevent the looting which broke out in 2005. In further echoes of Katrina, the streets of the city were lined by heavily armed police officers. -( Additional reporting Guardian service)