The floodwall on the eastern side of the Industrial Canal failed during Katrina, causing a flood that destroyed the historic, largely African-American neighborhood as well as adjacent St. Bernard Parish.
But officials of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said there had been no breaches, either in that floodwall or anywhere else in the complex levee network protecting the New Orleans metropolitan area, and they said they were confident that the system would continue to hold - even though work to fully repair Katrina's damage will not be completed until 2011.
Gustav blew in packing much less of a punch than Katrina, which arrived as a Category 3 storm with a monstrous 27-foot storm surge. Gustav's surge was predicted to top out at 14 feet.
President Bush, who skipped the Republican National Convention to monitor Gustav from Texas, applauded local, state and federal efforts to cope with the storm. Bush was widely faulted for the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
"The coordination on this storm is a lot better ... than during Katrina," Bush said, noting how the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had been working in concert. "It was clearly a spirit of sharing assets, of listening to somebody's problems and saying, 'How can we best address them?' "
Meanwhile, the nearly 2 million people who left coastal Louisiana under mandatory evacuation orders issued by every southern parish watched TV coverage of the hurricane from shelters and hotel rooms scattered hundreds of miles away. Many were enduring an anxious wait to learn the fate of their homes.
Cong Doan, 34, of Chauvin, a coastal fishing town near where Gustav made landfall, sat playing cards with his wife and several of his six children on cots at a shelter in Alexandria, La.
"I just keep telling myself: Whatever happens, happens. There's not much to do," he said. "We're going to go back. But whether we have anything to go back to, I don't know."
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
