As America wakes up on this Labor Day, it sees another serious situation unfolding along the Louisiana coast. Reminders of what occurred three years ago are echoing across televisions throughout the country as the media traveled down to New Orleans to see whether or not the city and the United States for that matter, have learned their lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the storm’s aftermath in late August and early September 2005.

Hurricane Gustav is not the same storm that it was when it raked the Isle of Youth and villages across Western Cuba on Saturday. The storm has struggled to find itself after crossing Western Cuba following a rapid intensification from early Friday into the late afternoon on Saturday. So, like Katrina, it gave the Central Gulf Coast region a break. Nevertheless, the storm is heading to a landfall west of the city of New Orleans, which means the Big Easy will be in the dangerous right front quadrant of Gustav. Still a major hurricane, Gustav has winds sustained at 115 miles per hour. The overall structure of Gustav has become elongated, ragged, and less symmetrical that it was at peak intensity on Saturday afternoon, but it still can pack a powerful wallop.

Heeding the warning this time, people left New Orleans in droves this weekend. As a matter of fact, much of Louisiana was on the move. In the largest evacuation the state has ever experienced, 1.9 million people in Louisiana left their homes for higher and safer ground. It was an evacuation that rivaled that of the one along the Southeast prior to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which was the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the United States. The last mass exodus in the Gulf Coast that measured up to the one this weekend was during another Labor Day storm, Hurricane Elena back in 1985. However, Elena was much more erratic in its motion, which was the cause for a lot of the movement by anxious coastal residents.

There has been a lot of discussion about how the levee system will hold up as well as the new gated system that has been implemented in parts of the city of New Orleans. In light of what was found in the wake of Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers, like FEMA, are under much scrutiny. Let’s face facts, the last time, it was basically a man-made disaster. This time, mother nature is going to throw more at New Orleans. We’ll find out very quickly whether or not the city has passed the test, and the modifications, if any, can withstand what Gustav dishes out. I’m pessimistic. It has only been three years, and there have already been instances where, corners have been cut, but we’ll see.