New Orleans' mayor instituted a dusk-to-dawn curfew until the storm passes [AFP]

The category-three storm's 200kph winds are expected to strengthen on Sunday and more than 11 million residents in five US states could feel the impact of the storm, forecasters said.

A mass evacuation of New Orleans was under way on Sunday - nearly three years to the day that Hurricane Katrina killed 1,500 people as it carved a path of destruction across the city.

Forecasters said it was too early to say whether the city, which is still struggling to rebuild after Katrina, will take another direct hit.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, warned residents: "If you stay, you're on your own."

Roads around the city were jammed as thousands of people in cars and hundreds crammed into buses attempted to flee.

Nagin said the storm could strike New Orleans on Monday morning local time, but forecasters had earlier warned it was expected to make landfall early on Tuesday.

Most hotels were closed and the city's airport was preparing to shut down on.

Compulsory evacuation

Nagin has told New Orleans 240,000 residents that evacuation is compulsory on the city's west side of the Mississippi river, while a dusk-to-dawn curfew would operate on the east bank.

Forecasters have been more moderate in their predictions, saying the storm should make landfall somewhere between western Mississippi and East Texas, where evacuations were also under way.

Over a million people in New Orleans have been evacuated ahead of the giant storm [AFP]

John McCain, the US presidential nominee for the Republican party, said most activities planned for the first day of his party's convention in Minnesota, Missouri, on Monday would be suspended because of the hurricane emergency.

"I hope and pray we will be able to resume some of our normal  operations as quickly as possible," McCain said.

Federal agencies working in New Orleans, which had failed to cope with the challenge of Hurricane Katrina, say they are well prepared to handle the evacuations this time.

Gustav has killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean with the hardest-hit countries being Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Haiti - the hemisphere's poorest nation.

Energy companies, whose 4,000 platforms in the Gulf produce a quarter of US crude oil and 15 per cent of its natural gas, have been evacuating personnel and shutting down three-quarters of their oil production.

Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which followed it three weeks later, wrecked more than 100 Gulf oil platforms.

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