As the outer edge of Hurricane Gustav reached the US coast this morning, at least two Britons remained bunkered down in their homes in New Orleans, determined to ride through the wrath of the storm.

While almost 2 million people had fled the areas surrounding the Louisiana coast, Britons Alan Pond and James Lewis were among fewer than 10,000 who stayed in New Orleans, where police and national guard troops patrolled the empty city in Humvees as a curfew went into effect in an attempt to prevent looting.

Mr Pond, a former Royal engineer in the British Army, remains at home this morning with his wife Candace, an American nurse, who spent yesterday helping patients at a nearby nursing home prepare for evacuation.

The 62-year-old said he wasn’t scared of the impending force of Gustav, as he had lived through four hurricanes previously, including the devastating Katrina.

“I’ve got my barbeque, a 12-guage shotgun, an automatic pistol, gallons of water, we’ve boarded everything up, we’ve fed the animals, we’ve got everything we need – we’re ready,” he told the Times Online.

“This house has been here since the 1880s, it’s going to be fine.”

Mr Pond’s friend, also a former member of the British Army, however, did not share his faith in the city. His friend had cut short his holiday and fled New Orleans on one of the last flights to the UK after heeding the advice of Mayor Ray Nagin, who warned residents of the city of 239,000 to evacuate the “mother of all storms”.

Mr Pond, who originally comes from Woolwich in east London, has lived in Louisiana since 2003, and bought his current house in the Treme district in the aftermath of Katrina three years ago.

He was living in the French Quarter when Katrina struck, and says his house remained undamaged.

Across town another ex-pat was also refusing to flee. James Lewis, landlord of the Crown and Anchor British Pub in Algiers Point, just on the river in New Orleans, had closed the bar when the curfew began and was “literally waiting in the calm before the storm”.

“It’s eerily quiet in town at the moment,” Mr Lewis said, as he looked after his cat, a refugee from Katrina.

Mr Lewis bought the hotel a month before Katrina struck in 2005, and was forced to flee just hours before the hurricane hit and destroyed the town. He said his pub was badly affected by the gale-force winds, but the most damage came from the looters who ransacked it in the aftermath of the storm.

As a result he was this morning preparing to stay and protect his property.

“I just had a feeling of complete helplessness, not being able to protect my home and my business, and not being able to help my friends or neighbours,” he said.

“So I decided this time I wanted to stay”.

He was up at dawn yesterday preparing the house by boarding up windows, removing debris, and stocking up on crowbars, hammers, water, food, and even an inflatable boat.

“I’ve done all I can, it’s that point where you’ve made all the preparations you can and now you just wait,” he said.

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