From Dan Fleschner, TODAY producer
Around 5 p.m. local time in New Orleans, I went for a walk around the city, and the only people I saw were TV news people, police, and national guardsmen. That's it. The population downtown seems to have taken the warnings seriously.
I saw lots of boarded-up windows, sandbags, signs in the windows saying stores were closed indefinitely. I haven't seen a major city this empty since I walked around Milwaukee on a Sunday about 10 years ago when the Packers were playing the Bears.