Tropical Storm Isaac; Isaac Still A Tropical Storm For Now
BALDWIN: Seven years to the week since Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans finds itself a potential bulls eye here for a hurricane. Minutes ago, we got this update from the National Weather Center, basically saying that Tropical Storm Isaac is slowly moving now northwest toward the Gulf Coast. All you have to do is just listen. Do you hear the wind here? That palm tree. This is vide. This shows what it did as a tropical storm beating up the Keys and parts of the Florida coast. That's Big Pine Key, Florida. I want to take you to Haiti now where this storm killed six people on Saturday. Now emergency officials in the U.S. fear what Isaac will do as a hurricane. It is supposed to make landfall somewhere in the Gulf Coast sometimes tomorrow night, possibly in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. But as Isaac is on the move here, so are people living in and around the Gulf Coast region. You have gas lines as long as people drive to safer areas. Leader in Louisiana, Alabama, they are calling for mandatory evacuations in some areas.</s>GOV. BOBBY JINDAL (R), LOUISIANA: I would emphasize these are especially likely to be happening in low lying areas south of the intracoastal and outside of levee protected areas. And so folks that live in those areas, these are areas that have flooded before. These are areas that, when we've had previous storms, they've seen an accumulation of water. They know where they are.</s>BALDWIN: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, he was supposed to be here in Tampa. He's one of many governors, Chad Myers, who, for obvious reasons, are staying back at home. Show me the picture that you're standing next to. Tell me where Isaac is right now.</s>CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Isaac is in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. So it's hard to show on radar. It's outside what the radar can see. It's farther away from Key West and from Tampa and not close enough to New Orleans yet to see a good signature on radar. What I'm showing you here is all of this flooding going in south Florida, from Broward County down to Miami-Dade, all the way up to Brevard County, right along I-95 now, tremendous amounts of rain. So even though somewhere over here is the eye, the arm, one of the outer bands here, is already and still affecting Florida. So not done with Florida yet. All of this weather will translate up here to the Gulf Coast within the next 24 hours and obviously that's the next stop. The next stop here somewhere along very close to the mouth of the Mississippi. And that is 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning right there. Maybe that's maybe 2:00 p.m. And then onward and on up into the bayous either of Mississippi or all the way over toward New Iberia into Louisiana. It's going to be a little bit before we know if it's going to be left or right of this track or right on the track. If it stays on the track, this turns into a 95 mile per hour storm, literally right on top of New Orleans. And the new computer models just run, 17 inches of rain in New Orleans itself. Talk about the flood walls not allowing the water from Pontchartrain and from the river in. but sometimes that doesn't allow the water out. You get 17 inches of rain. It has to get pumped out of these because it's below the sea level. It's not going to run anywhere. The pumps have to run. Any big failure of those pump is another problem for New Orleans. Let's hope that doesn't happen.</s>BALDWIN: And, of course, we're talking New Orleans. We'll continue also talking Mississippi. I know they bore a lot of the brunt of Katrina. So certainly they're on our minds as well, Mississippi and Louisiana. Chad, thank you. Back here in Tampa, a Democrat -- perhaps we'll call it crashing -- crashing the Republican's big party. Coming up next, the chairman of next week's Democratic National Convention stopping by the CNN Grill. We're going to talk to him about Mitt Romney's strong showing in some of our news polls, including a poll on the economy. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa live in the CNN Grill. Back in a flash.