U.S. braces for Hanna as it cleans up Gustav

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. emergency officials prepared for a possible East Coast strike by Tropical Storm Hanna even as they worked to restore power and clean up on Tuesday after Hurricane Gustav's assault on Louisiana.

Hanna, first in a line of Atlantic storms brewing in Gustav's wake, was stalled and it remained difficult to predict where it would land or its intensity, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator David Paulison told a news conference.

Hanna reached hurricane status on Monday before slowing as it hit Haiti and the Bahamas on Tuesday, but it was expected to strengthen and could regain hurricane force within 36 hours.

"We have to watch this one very closely," Paulison said. "We are dealing with a major storm in the Gulf Coast area but we're ready to move into the Atlantic Coast should that hurricane come that way."

Gustav hit Louisiana on Monday as a Category 2 hurricane on the rising 1-to-5 scale of intensity, not as strong as once feared. About 1.4 million customers in Louisiana were without power and Gulf of Mexico oil-drilling rigs would take another two weeks to return to full production after precautionary shutdowns, officials said.

Hanna, over Hispaniola on Tuesday, was expected to travel up Florida's East Coast and possibly hit Georgia and the Carolinas, Paulison said.

FEMA has placed officials in those states to help state and local authorities review shelter preparations, evacuation routes and other storm planning, Paulison said.

"We can do the same types of things that we did in Louisiana and Mississippi, as far as having those evacuation plans in place and have the same type of response," he said.

"I was asked earlier several times: Does FEMA have enough people to do this? And the answer is yes."

Further out in the Atlantic, forecasters and emergency officials were watching tropical storms Ike and Josephine.

LESSONS FROM KATRINA

The Bush administration has generally won favorable marks for its response to Gustav, after the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 drove President George W. Bush's job approval ratings sharply downward.

Leaders of the Senate Homeland Security Committee said in a statement the federal and local agencies had learned important lessons on coordination and preparation from Katrina.

"Those lessons have helped save lives," said Chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent Democrat from Connecticut. He cautioned that the thousands of Katrina victims still needed recovery assistance.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the highest-ranking Republican on the panel, said: "We are seeing today a completely different FEMA from the agency that failed to respond to the victims of Hurricane Katrina."

In Gustav's aftermath, initial assessment flights over the Gulf of Mexico have shown no visible signs of damage to oil and natural gas drilling platforms. But a full return to production after Gustav could take two weeks, officials said.

On land, reconnecting the Baton Rouge-New Orleans corridor to the regional electricity grid is the first priority, U.S. Energy Department official Kevin Kolevar said.

A large portion of the corridor has electric power but the area is isolated from the broader regional grid and is supplied by three fossil-fuel plants, he said.

"Maintaining balance in this small island is difficult and the possibility does exist that these units could trip (and shut down), at which point New Orleans would again lose power."

(Reporting by Randall Mikkelsen, editing by David Alexander and John O'Callaghan)