Video: Race on to steer clear of Gulf storm

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2. Transcript of: Race on to steer clear of Gulf storm

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   HOLT: Good evening, I'm Lester Holt in tonight for Brian Williams .

   LESTER HOLT, anchor: The pace of evacuation at the site of the gulf oil blowout is picking up this evening, ahead of a storm now making its way towards the disaster zone. Tropical Storm Bonnie made landfall this morning just south of Miami before heading to open water. It was later downgraded to a tropical depression , but is expected to regain tropical storm strength over the weekend. And while right now it poses minimal danger to coastal communities along the gulf, officials are worried that it poses a significant threat to the armada of containment vessels at sea, as well as the floating tide of oil spread across the gulf. NBC 's Anne Thompson is watching developments for us in Venice , Louisiana , this evening. Anne :

   ANNE THOMPSON reporting: Good evening, Lester . Officials here are confident they can handle whatever Bonnie brings, in part because they had a dress rehearsal of sorts with the outer bands of Hurricane Alex . But they are taking no chances. Today there was not a minute to waste along Louisiana 's oil-weary coast. Tugboats pushed barges loaded down with boom and equipment up the Mississippi River . On shore, crews readied supplies to be transported out of the path of the storm. Seeing their protection move, some local officials criticized the strategy. But the leader of the federal response says the plan is rooted in his Hurricane Katrina experience.

   Admiral THAD ALLEN, Retired (National Incident Commander): I'm still haunted by the specter of flying in over New Orleans on the 5th of -- 6th of September as a -- as a principal federal official and looking down at New Orleans to a parking lot full of buses that were flooded and not used for evacuation because they were not moved in time.

   THOMPSON: Venice, Louisiana 's southernmost town, sits at sea level. The risk

   here: storm surge and flooding. Coast Guard Commander Claudia Gelzer is sending her supplies and people to higher ground nine miles away, safe but close enough to return quickly.

   Commander CLAUDIA GELZER (United States Coast Guard): The storm will move oil around. We want to just make sure we're in the right place as soon as possible after the storm.

   THOMPSON: BP's floating hotels for cleanup workers on the coast are vacant and moving to safe harbor, while all those fishing boats turned cleanup vessels are headed in.

   Mr. FRED LEMOND (BP Branch Director): Those folks will return today, but we won't deploy those tomorrow as we expect maybe landfall maybe sometime tomorrow.

   THOMPSON: At the leak site, the two rigs drilling the relief wells pulled up their pipes and started their slow journey out of the storm 's path; while outside New Orleans , the federal hearings into the explosion that killed 11 workers were stunned by testimony that the rig's general alarm had been adjusted not to ring at Transocean 's insistence.

   Mr. MIKE WILLIAMS (Transocean Ltd.): They did not want people woke up at 3:00 in the morning due to false alarms.

   THOMPSON: Now, regardless of what kind of wallop Bonnie packs, it has already altered the timeline to kill the well, pushing it 12 days past the

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