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Senior hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart tracks Isaac at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Tropical Storm Isaac has been upgraded to a hurricane as it approaches the Gulf Coast. (Alan Diaz / Associated Press / August 28, 2012)

Tropical Storm Isaac is now Hurricane Isaac -- and the Army Corps of Engineers says New Orleans is ready for it.

The storm reached hurricane strength late Tuesday morning, with the National Hurricane Center saying in an alert posted at 11:20 a.m. EDT:  "Reconnaissance data indicate Isaac finally achieves hurricane status.’’

A big, slow-moving storm more than 350 miles wide, Isaac was plugging along at just 10 mph, moving northwest about 75 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Maximum sustained winds reached 75 mph, the Hurricane Center said, passing the 74 mph threshold for a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.

PHOTOS: Tropical Storm Isaac is now Hurricane Isaac gallery

As Isaac neared landfall, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center issued a tornado watch from southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi eastward to the Florida Panhandle through Tuesday evening.

The tornado watch covers 11 Louisiana parishes, six Mississippi counties, three Alabama counties and seven Florida counties until 7 p.m. CDT.

The storm is on track to make landfall along the southeastern Louisiana coast by nightfall Tuesday, confronting New Orleans with a test of a levee and pump station system that failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Those systems have been repaired, replaced or upgraded as part of a massive $11-billion inter-agency effort led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of an ongoing $14.6-billion federal project.

"We took a lot of lessons learned from Katrina,’’ said Rene Poche of the Corps’ office in New Orleans. "We believe the system will perform as designed.’’

Upgrades to pump stations allow operators to remain safely on site, for instance; many operators were evacuated during Katrina, leaving pumping stations unstaffed. Pumping stations have also been outfitted with back-up generators and other fuel sources.

The upgrades include the world’s largest pump station, and a revamped pump system that can pump an inch of rain an hour for the first hour of a storm, and a half-inch every hour afterward, Poche said.

Some levees that stood only four feet during Katrina have been raised to 16 feet, with some flood walls as high as 30 feet.  Because of levee foundation failures and "scouring’’ – erosion – of earthen levees during Katrina, foundations have been strengthened and armored, according to the corps.

The hurricane center has warned of storm surges of six to 12 feet, and rainfalls of up to 20 inches. Isaac is expected to linger, drenching low-lying areas with heavy rains and sustained winds.

Calling Isaac a "dangerous storm,’’ President Obama urged residents to evacuate if they’re asked to do so.

"Now is not the time to tempt fate,’’ the president said at the White House, stressing that flooding and other damage could be significant in southeastern Louisiana and other states along the Gulf coast.

"Now is not the time to dismiss official warnings,’’ he said.

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david.zucchino@latimes.com

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1 of 32. A resident of Plaquemines Parish who was rescued from his flooded home sits in the back of a pickup truck during Hurricane Isaac in Braithwaite, Louisiana August 29, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Lee Celano

By Ellen Wulfhorst and Scott Malone

NEW ORLEANS | Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:32am EDT

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The Isaac weather system is expected to weaken further as it heads north on Thursday, having caused significant damage to the U.S. Gulf Coast but nothing on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The former Category One hurricane is likely to become a tropical depression on Thursday, and move over southern Arkansas by early Friday, the National Hurricane Center said.

As Isaac ebbs, post-mortems should show that an elaborate flood containment plan developed for low-lying New Orleans survived its first major test, seven years to the day after Katrina laid waste to large parts of the iconic city and killed more than 1,800 people.

And as the focus shifts from the coast, many further north will hope that Isaac brings rains desperately needed to ease a drought in the center of the United States, where summer crops have been ravaged and many rivers and dams are critically low.

The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, said the $14.5 billion system built for New Orleans by the Army Corps of Engineers -- an array of walls, floodgates, levees and pumps -- had performed "exactly as it should."

Isaac was never close to packing the punch of Katrina, which was a Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale when it smashed into New Orleans on August 29, 2005 - a day that still reverberates in the nation's psyche.

And early indications are that property damage from Isaac will not crack the top-10 list of worst U.S. hurricanes by inflation-adjusted losses.

But the storm still produced major headaches, especially the seemingly endless rain that caught many long-time residents by surprise, trapped some on rooftops, and caused significant flooding in low-lying coastal areas.

SLOW MOVING

Isaac's advance slowed to a crawl after it first grazed the southeast Louisiana coast on Tuesday. That slowdown allowed it to pick up strength and dump rain for many more hours than expected. Flooding and storm surges forced thousands from their homes in areas not far from New Orleans.

"There is no such thing as 'just' a tropical storm," Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said after Isaac was downgraded from Hurricane strength on Wednesday.

Fugate's boss, U.S. President Barack Obama, declared the impact on Louisiana and Mississippi major disasters and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts.

The NHC estimated total rainfall amounts from Isaac of 7 to 14 inches, enough for widespread lowland flooding. Isolated maximum amounts over much of Louisiana and parts of Mississippi, Alabama and even Arkansas were expected to be as much as 25 inches.

Storm surges at high tide were also as high as 12 feet on the coast of Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana. Thousands were evacuated from St. John the Baptist Parish, north of New Orleans, after surges in Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas.

New Orleans was provided with a heavy security presence to prevent any repeat of the days-long crime wave and general chaos that followed Katrina.

Police and National Guard units, many armed with assault rifles, patrolled dark and nearly deserted streets in downtown New Orleans, usually a hotbed of tourism.

The city was still being lashed by rain and high winds on Wednesday night and about 60 percent of all homes and businesses were without power.

GHOST TOWN

"It's a ghost town," said Sgt. Joseph Jennings, a member of the Louisiana Army National Guard patrolling the streets in an armored humvee.

"Everybody saw the widespread looting during Katrina and nobody wants that to happen again."

The darkness of the Lower Ninth Ward was eerily reminiscent of Katrina, when a nearby levee failed and the largely poor and black neighborhood was inundated by deadly floodwaters.

In the nearby Seventh Ward, one of the city's poorest and most crime-ridden areas, residents could be seen in shadows on porches, standing outside their darkened homes.

Earlier, along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, Donalyn Lott watched a pumping station sucking water out of an overflowing drainage canal and into the lake.

"We're holding up pretty good … no flooding," Lott said.

About 3,000 residents were forced from their homes in St. John the Baptist Parish, upriver from New Orleans, by flooding caused by storm surges.

Evacuations were also needed in Plaquemines Parish, a major shrimping area southeast of New Orleans that bore the brunt of the northward-moving storm.

Dozens were plucked from the roofs of their houses by local boatmen after earlier deciding they could ride out what compared with Katrina seemed like a small storm.

"This storm has delivered more of a punch than people thought," said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.

More than 730,000 Louisiana and Mississippi customers of Entergy Corp and other local utilities were without power as of late Wednesday.

City officials also said Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which closed late Monday, would remain shut on Thursday as the lines that supply it with power were knocked out by the storm.

Benchmark crude oil prices slipped on Wednesday on expectations that damage to oil facilities, offshore and along the coast, would be limited. Major oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil Corp, began making plans to assess or restart operations.

(Additional reporting by Ben Gruber and Kathy Finn in New Orleans, Emily Le Coz in Tupelo, Mississippi, Chris Baltimore in Houston, Ben Berkowitz in Boston and Jane Sutton and David Adams in Miami; Writing by Ros Krasny; Editing by David Brunnstrom)

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