On August 26 the storm, at one point up to a Category 5, was in the Gulf with a projection to possibly hit New Orleans a few days later. (The previous day the projected path was towards the Florida Panhandle.) On August 27 Mayor Nagin declared a state of emergency and called for a voluntary evacuation. The following day he issued the city's first ever whole-city mandatory evacuation order. A mandatory evacuation order is an extreme measure: the most recent such order in Louisiana occurred when east New Orleans was ordered evacuated in 1965.