Hurricane Isaac: Horrible sense of déjà vu as hurricane heads for New Orleans

SEVEN years to the day since Hurricane Katrina all but destroyed their city, residents of New Orleans were waking today to find that the nightmare had returned.

• Isaac is likely to gather strength and be upgraded to hurricane status

• Storm still nowhere near as powerful as Katrina in 2005

• President Obama warns residents to ‘take this seriously

Hurricane Isaac, with winds of up to 90mph, was barrelling in from the Gulf of Mexico last night bringing a massive storm surge and enough rain to give the city’s post-Katrina flood defences their first real test.

While the storm, blamed for dozens of deaths during its earlier path through the Caribbean, was not as intense as its 2005 predecessor, officials from the National Hurricane Centre in Miami warned that Isaac was still a massive cyclone with damaging winds stretching more than 300 miles from its core.

“A dangerous storm surge, heavy rainfall and strong winds extend well away from the centre and are expected to affect a large portion of the northern Gulf Coat,” said senior hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart.

A state of emergency was declared in four Gulf Coast states, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, more than 4,000 National Guard troops were put on standby and residents of outlying villages and towns on the coast were ordered to evacuate.

President Barack Obama issued a federal declaration freeing up funds for disaster relief and spoke of the potential devastation.

“We’re dealing with a big storm and there could be significant flooding and other damage across a large area,” he said.

“Now is not the time to tempt fate, now is not the time to dismiss official warnings. You need to take this seriously,” he added, directly addressing those in the storm’s predicted path.

No mandatory evacuation was ordered in New Orleans, which saw flooding to many areas during Katrina when pumps failed and levees holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain burst.

Billions of dollars have since been spent on higher and stronger levees and more reliable and powerful pumping equipment, leaving city officials confident that they would stand up to Isaac’s onslaught.

“The people of the metropolitan area, the people of Louisiana have been through many, many storms. We are very well prepared,” said Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans.

“We feel very good about our ability, if we do the things that we know that we can do, to weather this storm.”

But Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana who cancelled a trip to the Republican National Convention in Tampa to oversee storm preparations, was critical of Obama’s “limited” response, which he said was not financially sufficient.

“The projected path of the storm threatens the entire state,” he said. “The speed with which this threat developed has necessitated extraordinary emergency protective measures. We re-emphasise the request for full federal assistance for the state.”