By TIMOTHY W. MARTIN and DANIEL GILBERT
NEW ORLEANSâ€"Hurricane Isaac lashed New Orleans with 70-mile-per-hour winds and heavy rain, but the slow-moving storm appeared to be veering west of the hunkered-down city Wednesday morning, seven years to the day after the much more powerful Katrina.
About 75% of New Orleans residents were without power and there was some minor street flooding, according to emergency officials. The storm's surge topped a levee in a sparsely populated community south of the city, closer to the mouth of the Mississippi River.
At 8 a.m. ET, the Category 1 hurricane was about 50 miles south-southwest of New Orleans, packing sustained winds of 80 miles an hour after making landfall in Louisiana Tuesday night, the National Weather Service said. It was plodding northwest at six miles per hour, toward Houma, La., west of New Orleans. A hurricane warning remained in effect from east of Morgan City in Louisiana to the Mississippi-Alabama border.
Isaac's center is forecast to move over Louisiana on Wednesday and Thursday, before crossing into southern Arkansas by early Friday. Forecasters expect the hurricaneâ€"which was wobbling but moving in a generally northwest direction at about 6 miles per hourâ€"to weaken as it moves over land.
Photos: Hurricane Isaac Pounds Louisiana
Compare Katrina, Isaac
Aerial images show the storms' similarities, differences.
In Mississippi, the main beachfront highway, U.S. 90, was closed in sections by storm surge flooding. At one spot in Biloxi, a foot of water covered the in-town highway for a couple of blocks and it looked like more was coming in. High tide around 9:30 a.m. was likely to bring up more water.
In largely abandoned Plaquemines Parish, storm surge was piling up against levees between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River along the boot of Louisiana. A levee on the parish's evacuated east bank had been overtopped. Sheriff's deputies were going house to house getting residents who had remained after an earlier evacuation to move to higher ground. No injuries were reported and streets were passable, according to a spokeswoman.
The Category 1 storm was far less powerful than Hurricane Katrina, which struck on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005. On Tuesday night, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the city had "dodged a bullet" with Isaac.
New Orleans is unusual in that much of it lies below sea level, which means that even though it is protected from surrounding coastal waters and the Mississippi River by levees and floodgates, it still can be easily overwhelmed by rains.
New Orleans relies on a system of 24 drainage pump stations to empty it of rainwater. About $ 1 billion has been spent since Katrina repairing and modernizing the pump stations, said Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans. But they can remove only an inch of water on streets in the first hour after the pumps are turned on and half an inch each hour after thatâ€"making flooding inevitable during heavy rainfall.
The 24 pumps "will be able to keep up, but there are no pumps in the world fast enough to keep the land dry when that much water is falling," Mr. Landrieu said.
"Our greatest hope is that the storm starts going a lot faster, because if it hovers over us, that's a bad situation for us," the mayor said.
Katrina-style floodingâ€"in which the surrounding coastal waters pushed over and through some levees and gatesâ€"wasn't expected, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said during a tour of some of the improvements to the city's flood-control system Tuesday.
"Nobody is expecting these levees to be overtopped, certainly not breached, given the investments that have been made," Mr. Jindal said as he visited the 17th Street Canal in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb, whose 11 gates, each weighing 11 tons, are closed during storms. "But the rainfall does present a huge challenge."
Further south, near the Louisiana coast, many residents sought shelter or evacuated, but not Calvin Loupe. He boarded up the windows on the house he rents in Lockport, La., stocked up on water, filled jugs with gasoline to power his generator and sat on a wooden rocker on the front porchâ€"waiting for Isaac.
"This house has been through many a storm," said Mr. Loupe, 54, whose leathery skin testifies to years of working in the surrounding sugar-cane fields. "It doesn't really get me nervous."
Toney Dardar also hunkered down, noting that a levee had protected his home in Golden Meadow, La., for 20 years. The shrimp-boat owner saw a silver lining: "Usually this weather makes shrimp plentiful," he said.
Energy companies shut down nearly all offshore oil production in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and their natural-gas output was cut by about two-thirds. The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees offshore-oil-and-gas operations, estimated that 1.3 million barrels a day of crude, or 93% of the oil production in the Gulf's federal waters, was offline by early afternoon Tuesday.
About a quarter of U.S. oil production takes place in the Gulf region, and refineries along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts contain nearly one-fifth of the country's capacity to process crude oil into diesel, gasoline and other fuels.
Evacuations are routine during the Atlantic hurricane season, and most observers said they expect Hurricane Isaac to leave little damage in its wake.
Since Katrina, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built up a $ 15 billion ring of defenses in and around New Orleansâ€"a 350-mile flood-protection network designed to protect it from a so-called 100-year storm or flood, roughly the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane, which Katrina was when it made landfall.
Still, some engineers and local politicians have argued the defenses may not be stout enough for the most severe hurricanes the city can face.
"It really ought to be something higher,'' said David Moreau, a city and regional planning professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Still, he said he doubted that Isaac had "fury enough" to test the defenses like Katrina did.
â€"Miguel Bustillo, Ãngel González, Ben Lefebvre, Jennifer Levitz, Devlin Barrett, Cameron McWhirter, Mike Esterl and the Associated Press contributed to this article.Write to Timothy W. Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com and Daniel Gilbert at daniel.gilbert@wsj.com
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