By Stacey Plaisance and Becky Bohrer, The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — With a historic evacuation complete, and gun-toting police and National Guardsmen standing watch over this city’s empty streets, the nation waited to see if Hurricane Gustav would be another Katrina.

The storm was set to crash ashore midday Monday with frightful force, testing the three years of planning and rebuilding that followed Katrina’s devastating blow to the Gulf Coast.

Painfully aware of the failings that led to that horrific suffering and more than 1,600 deaths, this time, officials moved beyond merely insisting tourists and residents leave south Louisiana. They threatened arrest, loaded thousands onto buses and warned that anyone who remained behind would not be rescued.

“Looters will go directly to jail. You will not get a pass this time,” Mayor Ray Nagin said. “You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You will go directly to the Big House.”

Col. Mike Edmondson, state police commander, said he believed that 90 percent of the population had fled the Louisiana coast. The exodus of 1.9 million people is the largest evacuation in state history, and thousands more had left from Mississippi, Alabama and flood-prone southeast Texas.

Louisiana and Mississippi changed traffic flow so all highway lanes led away from the coast, and cars were packed bumper-to-bumper. Stores and restaurants shut down, hotels closed and windows were boarded up. Some who planned to stay changed their mind at the last second, not willing to risk the worst.

“I was trying to get situated at home. I was trying to get things so it would be halfway safe,” said 46-year-old painter Jerry Williams, who showed up at the city’s Union Station to catch one of the last buses out of town. “You’re torn. Do you leave it and worry about it, or do you stay and worry about living?”

Forecasters said Gustav was likely to grow stronger as it marched toward the coast with top sustained winds of around 115 mph. At 5 p.m. EDT Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said Gustav was a Category 3 storm centered about 215 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River and moving northwest near 18 mph.

Against all warnings, some gambled and decided to face its wrath. On an otherwise deserted commercial block of downtown Lafayette, about 135 miles west of the city, Tim Schooler removed the awnings from his photography studio. He thought about evacuating Sunday but decided he was better off riding out the storm at home with his wife, Nona.

“There’s really no place to go. All the hotels are booked up to Little Rock and beyond,” he said. “We’re just hoping for the best.”

There were frightening comparisons between Gustav and Katrina, which flooded 80 percent of New Orleans when storm surge overtook the levees. While Gustav isn’t as large as Katrina, which was a massive Category 5 storm at roughly the same place in the Gulf, there was no doubt the storm posed a major threat to a partially rebuilt New Orleans and the flood-prone coasts of Louisiana and southeast Texas. The storm has already killed at least 94 people on its path through the Caribbean.

The storm could bring with it a storm surge of up to 14 feet and rainfall up to 20 inches wherever it hits. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina pushed about 25 feet of surge.

Surge models suggest larger areas of southeast Louisiana, including parts of the greater New Orleans area, could be flooded by several feet of water. Gustav appears most likely to overwhelm the levees west of the city that have for decades been underfunded and neglected and are years from an update.

In the West Bank community of Harvey, Paul and Judy Ross were the last ones left on their street at 8 a.m. as he put the final boards covering the windows of his home as she loaded up the car. Their home flooded during Katrina when a nearby drainage canal overflowed as pumps failed, and levee work remains incomplete around the nearby Harvey Canal.

“We’ve had it up to here with New Orleans,” the 56-year-old Ross said. “If we flood again, we’re goners. I don’t think we’re coming back.”

Even as they pressed to complete the evacuation, officials insisted there would be no repeat of the inept response to Katrina’s wrath. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said search and rescue will be the top priority once Gustav passes — high-water vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Coast Guard cutters and a Navy vessel that is essentially a floating emergency room are posted around the strike zone.

West of New Orleans in Houma, he wished passengers well as stragglers boarded buses for Shreveport and Dallas.

“I think for people who haven’t left, they really are die-hards, because they’re taking their lives in their hands,” he said. “I can’t see any reason why a person staring down the barrel of a Category 3 or Category 4 hurricane would want to see if they can try to outfox Mother Nature. That’s taking an awful risk with yourself and your family.”

Melissa Lee, who lives in Pearl River, a town near the boundary of Mississippi and Louisiana, was driving away to Florida Sunday. Before she left, she heard neighbors chopping down trees with chain saws, trying to ensure the tall pines that surrounded their homes wouldn’t come crashing down.

“I sent my son out with a camera and said, ‘Go take pictures of our backyard. Because it’s going to look different when we get back.”’

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