NEW ORLEANS — Whirling ashore like a destructive pinwheel, Hurricane Katrina delivered a hard but glancing blow Monday to New Orleans, then spent its full fury on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, swamping beach resorts and inland towns. At least 58 deaths were reported, most in Mississippi.
Public officials feared that deaths from Katrina would rise.
After hours of punishing rain and winds, emergency and rescue officials began maneuvering by boat and helicopter into remote stretches, looking for scores of residents reportedly stranded by floodwaters.
Katrina's last-minute wobble to the north spared New Orleans a direct hit, but the nearly deserted city still suffered through a long morning of terror as rising groundwater seeped through the ghostly French Quarter and shrieking headwinds shredded part of the roof of the Louisiana Superdome, where 10,000 refugees had sought shelter.
"It sounded like this place was under attack," said Tyrone Brinson, 47, a native New Orleans resident who listened, unnerved, inside the Superdome as the wind tore at the football stadium's arched sheet-metal roof. "It sounded like somebody was coming through the wall. I thought the roof might go, the building, the whole thing."
The roof held, as did the city's waterlogged levee system along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, although there was widespread flooding in and around New Orleans, much of which is below sea level.
Although Katrina weakened from the ominous Category 5 hurricane it had been hours earlier, it bulled ashore as a Category 4 storm with 140-mph winds. Katrina was the strongest hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast since 1969, when Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, killed 259 people.
Overnight Sunday, the hurricane's course shifted from west-northwest to a more northerly direction, said Eric Blake, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That was enough to steer the worst of the storm east of New Orleans, preventing its heaviest gusts from blowing from the east or southeast, which would have strained New Orleans' levees to flood stages.
"I can't say that I have a sense we escaped the worst," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, acknowledging the devastation of the state's eastern portion. "We have a tough, tough people."
