Updated: 09/03/2011 11:06:57 PM CDT
ATLANTA - Tropical Storm Lee continued to pound residents of the Gulf Coast on Saturday with heavy rainfall and tidal surges, forcing evacuations of some areas but leaving others, including New Orleans, relatively unscathed - although officials warned that the sloppy, slow-moving storm had the capability of causing more trouble.
"We expect storm conditions for the next 36 hours, so please do not be lulled into sleep by the breaks in the rain," Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans said at an afternoon news conference, before labeling the storm "one of the stranger ones we've had." Six to 8 inches of rain had accumulated in the city since the storm began, he said.
Lee, which intensified from a tropical depression Friday, is a large, lopsided system, with much of the precipitation on the northeast side - the side facing New Orleans - and tropical storm-force winds extending out 230 miles. Late Saturday afternoon, it was southwest of the city and "drifting erratically" to the north at a mere 4 mph, according to the National Weather Service. High winds and heavy rain are likely through today or Monday.
New Orleans, which was inundated in 2005 by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina, remained on alert Saturday, closing floodgates along its upgraded levee system and keeping swift-water rescue crews at the ready. But none had been called into action yet. Landrieu said only a handful of homes had received water from rain that had pooled in the streets. Some 8,000 homes
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A more troubling situation was unfolding south of the city, where winds from Lee were blowing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the small communities of Jean Lafitte, Barataria and Crown Point.
A mandatory evacuation order for those areas was issued Saturday by Jefferson Parish President John Young, who spent the day coordinating a response from a dump truck, as water sloshed into parts of these communities, just outside the New Orleans area levee system.
"It's not like the entire place is underwater, but certain places are," Young said in a phone interview, adding that only "two or three houses" had been flooded. "Right now we're acting out of an abundance of caution. We don't want to have people trapped in there."
Both Mississippi and Louisiana have declared states of emergency, and the Weather Service has issued a tropical storm warning that stretches from the Florida Panhandle to the Louisiana-Texas border.
On a positive note, Entergy, a power utility, reported that by early evening power had been restored to more than two-thirds of the roughly 35,000 customers in Louisiana who had lost electricity during the day. Most of the remaining homes without power - around 8,000 - were in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish.
The president of St. Tammany Parish, on the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, said that roads in some areas had become impassable.
In Alabama, rough seas prompted officials to close the Port of Mobile.
Casinos along the coast remained open and reported brisk business despite the storm.
This report includes information from the New York Times and Associated Press.
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