Almost two million weary evacuees from Hurricane Gustav prepared to return home yesterday with the unsettling knowledge that they may soon have to hit the road again because of another storm.

With Tropical Storm Ike ripening into a hurricane that could again threaten the US Gulf Coast, evacuees complained of hurricane fatigue after what the New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, called the “mother-in-law . . . of all storms”.

Though Hurricane Gustav killed 94 people as it barrelled across the Caribbean, only eight deaths were attributed to the storm in the US. The reinforced levees of New Orleans held up to their first test since their catastrophic failure during Hurricane Katrina, which flooded 80 per cent of the city and killed 1,600 people three years ago.

Beverly Cigler, a public policy professor at Penn State University, said that residents of New Orleans had to live with the continued need for large-scale evacuations, but that the city could shrink as a result. “It’s likely that some people won’t like the need to evacuate frequently and will move permanently to other places,” she said.

Most evacuees were resigned to the thought that they would have to leave their homes again.

Maureen Rogers and her husband, Claude, left the hotel in Lafayette where they spent the storm to try to drive home to Lydia, about 25 miles away towards the coast. “We have had a lot of hurricanes we have gone through. You have got to pack up and leave. Then you go home and have got to unpack and you have work for days ahead of you,” Mrs Rogers said.

“Officials certainly didn’t overreact,” said Don Kettl, a University of Pennsylvania public policy professor and co-editor of On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina. “As the photos of the waves lapping over the top of the Industrial Canal made clear, the city came within an eyelash of a bigger storm surge that would have pushed far more water — and far greater problems — into the city.”

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