This photo released by the U.S. Coast Guard shows flooding from Hurricane Gustav in the Rigolets strait in eastern New Orleans on Monday. (U.S. Coast Guard/Associated Press)U.S. President George W. Bush will travel to Louisiana on Wednesday to take a look at the damage caused by Hurricane Gustav.

The White House said Tuesday that Bush will be making several stops in Louisiana but the schedule has not yet been finalized.

Bush met with Vice President Dick Cheney, several cabinet secretaries and about 20 other advisers on Tuesday to assess the damage the hurricane wrought on U.S. oil drilling and refining operations in the Gulf Coast area.

Bush said that while it's too early to assess the damage, it should prompt Congress to OK more domestic oil production.

Gustav, which has now weakened to a tropical depression, moved inland Tuesday from the U.S. Gulf Coast after largely sparing the region devastation on the scale of Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

Although New Orleans was not inundated this time, it was still a wild ride for the battered city. High winds tore pieces off buildings, ripped up trees and pushed water to the very top of levees.

The CBC's Carolyn Dunn, reporting from New Orleans, said emergency crews and utility companies would be spending the day trying to assess the damage — early estimates put the figure at $8 billion to $10 billion US — and figure out when residents can return.

"The city's just not prepared to have an influx of hundreds of thousands of people who will be wanting to make their way back here," Dunn said. "Obviously it's not assessed as safe yet, either."

With transformers blown and power lines out, the electrical supply is crippled, she said.

"That is actually the biggest concern right now: How do you get that back up? That's really the only thing that going to make this city livable and safe for people to come back into."

Mayor Ray Nagin, announced Tuesday night that residents could start coming back early Thursday.

Speaking with reporters earlier in the day, he stressed that those who fled before the storm will not be left stranded in far-off shelters, as many were after Katrina.

"Re-entry is only days away, not weeks away, so I don't want anybody to think that we're talking about weeks," he said.

"Tomorrow, hopefully, we will have everything in order where we can — later on this week — we can have our citizens to start to come back into the city."

An estimated two million people, mostly from Louisiana, headed inland ahead of the storm, which killed at least 90 people across the Caribbean last week.

Some said Tuesday that authorities overreacted by ordering residents to leave their homes.

"Next time, it's going to be bad because people who evacuated like us aren't going to evacuate," said Catherine Jones, 53, of Silsbee, Texas, who spent three days on a cot at a church shelter with her disabled son. "They jumped the gun."

U.S. authorities reported eight deaths related to the storm, most of them traffic deaths, including four people killed in Georgia when their car struck a tree as they attempted to flee the storm. A Lafayette, La., man, 27, was killed when a tree fell on his house.

Medical emergencies

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the exodus included "the largest medical evacuation in our nation's history," with ambulances, buses and aircraft moving hospital patients and nursing-home residents out of harm's way, but some health-care facilities decided not to move their patients.

The Associated Press reported that about 800 patients who stayed behind might have to be evacuated from a dozen Louisiana hospitals in the next three days because the health-care facilities do not have air conditioning.

Trey Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana governor's office, said from the capital Baton Rouge that seven nursing homes might have to move their residents for the same reason.

While the facilities do have back-up generators, the emergency power doesn't run the air-conditioning systems, Williams said.

Temperatures reached about 29 C in New Orleans on Tuesday, with 82 per cent humidity, the U.S. National Weather Service reported.

Gustav made landfall at about 9:30 a.m. on Monday near Cocodrie, La., about 110 kilometres southwest of New Orleans, as a Category 2 hurricane.

It was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved over central Louisiana late Monday and reduced to a tropical depression early Tuesday.

In New Orleans, the wind had blown a few centimetres of water over the top of the Industrial Canal's flood wall, which broke during hurricanes Betsy and Katrina, but the city's levees were expected to hold.

Evacuees await chance to return home

The city of New Orleans was largely deserted, with only about 10,000 people remaining after a massive evacuation on Sunday.

As the storm moved inland, those packed into overcrowded shelters around the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Southeast Texas waited Tuesday to learn when buses that whisked them to safety during mandatory evacuations would return to take them home.

Authorities were keen to avoid a catastrophe similar to Katrina, which killed about 1,600 people and caused widespread flooding and destruction in 2005.

Thousands of the city's residents were forced to live for several months in emergency trailers hundreds of kilometres away from their hometown.

'We have to treat every one like it's a big deal'

Hurricane relief workers expressed concern any delay in allowing people to return to their homes could make people less inclined to comply with an evacuation order in any future storm.

"People look at the pictures and say, 'Oh, we could have ridden that out,' " Russ Paulsen, executive director of the American Red Cross's hurricane recovery program, told CBC News on Tuesday from Baton Rouge.

He said that could prove dangerous because forecasters, while able to pinpoint where a hurricane is expected to strike, often have no way of predicting how strong a storm will be.

"We have to treat every one like it's a big deal," Paulsen said.

Some minor fights broke out at a shelter in Shreveport, La., where evacuees had been packed together in a vacant Sam's Warehouse for three days.

"People are desperate. They don't know if they are going to have a place to go home to," said Emma McClure, 37, who was at the shelter with her three children, three sisters and some 20 nephews.

"They had three years to plan this and now I wish I had stayed in the city like I did during Katrina."

New storm batters Turks, Caicos Islands

Although the worst fears of U.S. coastal residents were not realized this time, Gustav is just one of four systems forecasters are watching.

While Gustav moves across Louisiana and Texas dropping heavy rain, CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe said, tropical storm Hanna, just 10 km/h short of hurricane strength, has begun affecting the Turks and Caicos, Haiti and Cuba, with the Bahamas its next stop.

Behind Hanna is tropical storm Ike, also expected to track westward, possibly toward the Bahamas.

And behind Ike is tropical storm Josephine, the tenth named storm of the Atlantic season. At this rate, there will be between 13 and 15 such storms, making it an above-average season, Wagstaffe said.

The season continues through November, but September is the peak month because of the prevailing winds and very warm ocean temperatures, she said.

With files from the Associated Press