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New Orleans: The mayor of New Orleans ordered the city’s more than 239,000 residents to evacuate on Sunday ahead of powerful Hurricane Gustav.
"This is the mother of all storms," Mayor Ray Nagin said of Gustav, a Category 4 storm that could approach the central Louisiana coast just west of New Orleans on Monday.
"You need to be concerned and you need to get [yourself] moving and out of New Orleans right now," Nagin said at City Hall. "This is the storm of the century."
The evacuation order will start with the city's low-lying West Bank early on Sunday.
Residents have the choice to remain behind and weather the storm, but "that would be one of the biggest mistakes that you could make in your life," Nagin said.
Thousands of people fled New Orleans earlier on Saturday, while the government lined up hundreds of buses and trains to evacuate 30,000 people who cannot leave on their own.
About 10,000 people left the city by bus or train on Saturday, Nagin said. The rest of the 20,000 people that had requested evacuation assistance would leave on Sunday, he added.
Many evacuees were issued wrist bands with bar codes that will allow city officials to track them.
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