Washington/Havana - A million people were fleeing their homes in New Orleans on Sunday as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the city, hours after inflicting "considerable damage" in western Cuba. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin bluntly told citizens: "You need to be scared. You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century."
Gustav strengthened to a dangerous category 4 hurricane late on Saturday, on the 1-to-5 Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. The storm was expected to make US landfall on Monday afternoon.
Nagin also told citizens that if they choose to stay behind, they would be "on their own." Free buses and trains were being provided on Sunday morning to evacuate residents of the city, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said that highways would have all lanes open leaving the city.
By Saturday night, the eye of the hurricane was located about 915 kilometres southeast of the north-central Gulf of Mexico coast. "Gustav is forecast to remain a major hurricane through landfall along the northern Gulf Coast," the National Hurricane Center in Miami (NHC) said.
More than 11.5 million Gulf Coast residents from Florida to southern Texas could be affected by Gustav, which would batter more than 175,00 square kilometres of coastline, the US Census Bureau said.
Thousands were streaming further inland from the US states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, where President George W Bush declared an emergency, allowing the federal government to coordinate disaster relief efforts.
Meanwhile authorities in Cuba on Sunday were moving to assess damage and allow evacuees to return to their homes. Gustav swept through the western part of the island on Saturday.
According to reports by the state-run Cuban News Agency (ACN), more than 250,000 people were evacuated from their homes in four western provinces and island regions on Friday and Saturday as the storm approached.
The storm had had a "severe impact on house roofs and other infrastructure," the agency said, although it added that no injuries had so far been reported.
Gustav had already claimed more than 80 lives in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and neighbouring Mississippi, leaving more than 1,800 people dead. Authorities stressed that advances have been made in disaster response plans and in repairing levees since then.
