New Orleans escapes devastation of Katrina with category two storm.
Hurricane Gustav was downgraded from a category four to a category two tropical storm as it reached the inland, where it met a mostly empty New Orleans after about 1.9 million people abandoned their homes in Louisiana’s coastal areas.
It was reported that water did breach some levees but defences held for the most part. The water that washed over the Industrial Canal has exposed a weakness in the system, and there are questions over how well defences would have held up had the storm been a category four. Katrina was a category five storm.
Yesterday when Gustav had been a category three, Risk Management Solutions, a catastrophe risk expert, had estimated that insured losses from Gustav could range between $4bn and $10bn. This included both on and offshore losses from wind and storm surge, and did not include any potential damage to the levees in New Orleans, or flooding from excessive rainfall that may occur in the following days.
“Even though Gustav has now made landfall, the situation remains precarious and a number of factors could push the insured loss estimate in either direction,” a spokeswoman for RMS said yesterday. “Offshore damage was not as extensive as originally anticipated, as Gustav weakened from a category four hurricane to a category three storm before blustering into the platforms. The platforms tend to be fairly resilient to category three level winds, so the structural damage and impact on production will be relatively low.”
Half of New Orleans was left without power and the death toll may have been kept to single figures, Bloomberg said.
The storm is expected to reach northeastern Texas later today when it may become a tropical depression.
