"You don't have to have your house blown away to decide that you don't want to go through this year after year," said Susan Howell, a retired University of New Orleans political science professor who moved away from New Orleans last year out of post-Katrina exhaustion. "Particularly people who sat on the highway in a traffic jam for 14 hours only to come back to find everything is OK - Gustav could definitely push them over the edge." The successful performance of the levees could prove a two-edged sword as well.
Certainly it was encouraging that the 350 miles of levees and floodwalls, still only partially repaired after suffering numerous ruptures and breaches during Katrina, withstood a Category 2 hurricane packing 110 mph winds.
But if New Orleanians draw from Gustav a lesson that they can depend on the levees to protect them from the next hurricane and therefore stay home, they could make a fatal mistake.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has conceded that its $15 billion levee-rebuilding program is falling far behind schedule and won't be complete until at least 2011. What's more, even when the repairs are finished, the floodwalls will be restored only to the level where they were supposed to have been when Katrina struck: protection against a medium-sized Category 3 hurricane.
Congress has repeatedly refused to appropriate the additional billions it would cost to raise and fortify New Orleans levees against a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.
"People focus on what happened last - that has the most power psychologically," Howell said. "What they saw with Gustav was that the levees worked as the Corps said they would." For his part, Nagin - who drew withering criticism for his failure to help the city's poorest residents evacuate ahead of Katrina in 2005 - pronounced himself pleased with the success of the Gustav evacuation and insisted it was not a case of crying wolf.
Impelled by the memory of more than 1,800 victims who perished in Katrina's floodwaters, city, state and federal officials executed a well-coordinated plan this time to assemble more than 18,000 city residents needing help to evacuate and get them onto a stream of buses and trains headed to shelters far from the hurricane danger zone.
"I would not do a thing differently," Nagin said. "I'd probably call Gustav, instead of the mother of all storms, maybe the mother-in-law or the ugly sister of all storms."
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
