By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 26, 1992; Page A1

NEW ORLEANS, AUG. 26—Hurricane Andrew lashed the ragged coast of Louisiana early today as the killer storm, spewing tornadoes up the Mississippi River corridor, touched land south of Morgan City.

Officials at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Fla., said that Andrew's maximum sustained winds were slowing to 125 mph – from 140 mph – as its eye made landfall about 1 a.m. CDT. While noting that the storm might still wobble and remained unpredictable, officials said they expected the hurricane to continue in a northwesterly direction and skirt the coast before moving completely inland.

The first severe injuries in Louisiana were reported in the river town of La Place. State Police spokesman Aaron Chabaud said the tornadoes struck at 9:18 p.m. CDT Tuesday and injured 30 people, some of them seriously. The town was without power and lights, making rescue efforts more difficult.

Residents of the region south of Lafayette fled vulnerable coastal towns in a day-long exodus Tuesday that jammed the highways bumper-to-bumper for 45 miles running from Jeanerette all the way north toward the higher ground of Alexandria.

The storm spread and intensified as it swirled over warm gulf waters for a second day Tuesday, sending gale-force winds and fierce squalls along a wide swath from the Florida Panhandle to southwestern Louisiana.

Mindful of the hurricane's deadly and costly journey across South Florida on Monday, Gov. Edwin W. Edwards (D) declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and about 1.2 million Gulf Coast residents exacuated the danger zone extending west past the Texas border toward Beaumont and Houston.

Thunderstorms and strong winds plowed into the jagged Louisiana coastline several hours ahead of the hurricane, knocking out power in several thinly populated parishes (counties) south of New Orleans. Law enforcement officials began closing roads near the coast and, by 8:30 p.m. Tuesday were advising all drivers, even those intending to flee northward, to stay off roads and head for shelter.

Earlier Tuesday, New Orleans, the city that never sleeps, essentially shut down, as an eerie quiet settled over the downtown between squalls, the silence interrupted by the sounds of power saws and hammers as merchants shuttered store fronts at the last minute.

The bustling French Quarter seemed abandoned. Storm-wise car owners in the Garden District moved their automobiles onto the median strips, a foot or so above streets that are below sea level. City officials opened 13 shelters for people evacuated from low-lying areas, and Mayor Sidney Barthelemy (D) bolstered his police forces with a regiment of National Guard troops who he said were to assist with traffic and "make sure life and property will be protected."

Barthelemy said he got little sleep Monday night worrying about what Andrew might do to his city, whose peculiar geography has been described as a soup bowl, with more than two-thirds of it below sea level. A direct hit, Barthelemy said, would be "something horrible, oh my!"

As the eye of the hurricane continued moving northwest, Barthelemy expressed a tentative sense of relief but said the state's most populous city was by no means safe. "We're still cautious, still vigilant," Barthelemy said after reaffirming his evacuation order for 10,000 citizens living in the Crescent City's low-lying neighborhoods.

The fickleness of man and nature was on display over a five-hour period in New Orleans late Tuesday. At 5 p.m., during a brief period when the area seemed becalmed, dozens of people in East Jefferson Parish who had been in a shelter decided that danger had passed, so they left their protected quarters and headed home. But by 9 p.m., that area was hit by winds of 35 mph and a thunderstorm that knocked out the lights.

To the south and west of New Orleans, anxiety was more intense. Bobby Santine, a civil defense official in the barrier island town of Grand Isle, said he told people to "either leave or let me know your next of kin." By mid-evening Tuesday, the tidal surge at Grand Isle was reported at eight feet above normal. Officials said power lines were knocked out and reported considerable damage to homes and buildings on the barrier island, where only a few of the 1,200 residents ignored Santine's warning to flee.

While Interstate 10 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and from Baton Rouge to Lafayette was jammed much of Tuesday with people heading north, the most compelling exodus took place along the populated strip south and north of Lafayette.

"I'm looking out at an incredible traffic jam," said Louisiana State Police Sgt. Richard Hazelwood, as he gazed out the window of Troop I's headquarters on Interstate 49 just north of Lafayette. "We're talking bumper-to-bumper halfway up to Alexandria and all the way down to Jeanerette, maybe a 45-mile backup."

"We've told everybody to get out of town, and they seem to be doing it at the same time," said Capt. Bruce Temple of the New Iberia police force. "Everyone was waiting to see where it was going to hit. It's a jam, but we're going to get everybody out of here slowly but surely before midnight."

In Houma, a low-lying town of about 31,000 surrounded by five bayous, officials estimated that perhaps half of the residents had evacuated.

Authorities expressed concern about hundreds of residents reluctant to leave mobile homes. Several trailer parks in the area were damaged by Hurricane Juan in 1985. Many of the structures sit on cinderblocks several feet above ground, attached to the soft earth by metal posts.

In the Gulf of Mexico, offshore oil platforms were evacuated.

The major concern in many Louisiana cities, especially New Orleans, has been that heavy rains and a tidal surge at the front of the hurricane would cause massive flooding. "We're looking at potential trouble no matter where Andrew hits, if the rain is heavy," said Alan Francingues, chief engineer of the Orleans Parish levee board.

Francingues said that New Orleans has 131 miles of levees with 37 drainage valves and 111 floodgates, all designed to save the city from a massive hurricane-inspired flood, but that the system "has never really been put to a severe test."

He said levee workers closed the floodgates – enormous cement gates up to 30 feet wide and 10 feet high – Monday when "we realized we had a monster on our hands." The floodgates are to remain closed through the end of the week at least, he said. The levees are 19 feet high, capable of withstanding a storm surge of 16 feet, far more than Andrew is expected to blow into the area.

All schools in Orleans Parish and in parishes across the southern half of the state closed Tuesday and are to remain closed indefinitely. Schools and government offices also were closed along the Mississippi coast and into Texas near Port Arthur. Several schools in New Orleans were turned into emergency shelters for 10,000 city residents ordered to evacuate houses in low-lying areas.

"I've been through this before, many times," said Stanford Lambert, a retired watchman spending the night at Warren Easton High School on the rim of downtown New Orleans with his wife, mother, daughter and three grandchildren.

Lambert said his house in Harvey has been flooded six times over the years. "Betsy did a lot of damage – we had snakes swimming by our front porch," he said of Hurricane Betsy, which struck Louisiana Sept. 9, 1965. "No way I want to look at snakes again."

Andrew would become the fourth hurricane, including Betsy, that struck Florida's coast and then the Gulf Coast in this century, authorities said.

On the western end of the state, Will Bidecker, chief ranger at Sabine Wildlife Refuge, spent Tuesday worrying about snakes and other reptiles, as well as birds, fish and wetlands that might take a cruel blow from the hurricane even if human tragedy is averted.

The tidal surge, Bidecker said, would push more saltwater into the largely freshwater wetlands, "bringing a severe adverse effect on the marshland vegetation and critters." The Sabine refuge alone has 28,000 alligators imperiled by the storm.

The coastal wetlands of Louisiana have been in dire shape for more than three decades, first damaged by hurricanes Audrey and Carla in 1957 and 1961, respectively, then affected by man-made developments and waterway engineering, Bidecker said.

"In the last few years, we've been spending some money to try to restore these wetlands, and now Andrew threatens to undo what we've done," he said.

Staff writer Rene Sanchez and special correspondent John DeSantis in New Orleans contributed to this report.