VIDALIA — Emergency officials are saying Concordia Parish should just be another stop along a longer evacuation route for Hurricane Gustav.

New Orleans area officials have said they will begin mandatory evacuations at noon today if the hurricane continues on the path of some weather model projections, in which it is expected to make landfall on the Louisiana coast early Tuesday morning.

“We are going to be directing evacuations to shelters further north,” Vidalia Police Chief Ronnie G. “Tapper” Hendricks said. “Once those shelters fill up, we’ll start using our shelters here.”

That is because, in part, the Vidalia Conference and Convention Center, the newest addition, which is designed to double as a Red Cross evacuation center, has not received a certificate of completion from its contractor, which would make it harder to limit liability, and because the health department has not given it the all clear.

“We couldn’t open that shelter legally if we wanted to,” Concordia Parish Emergency Director Morris White said. “That is the only shelter we have got in Concordia Parish, and the only person who has the power to open it is the governor.”

The decision not to open any shelters in the parish did not lie with him or anyone locally, but rather with the Louisiana State Shelter Taskforce, White said.

“This is the first time since I have been (emergency) director we have not opened a shelter,” he said.

When it does go into use, the Vidalia shelter will ideally be used to house the families of emergency workers while the workers are traveling back and forth to the emergency zones, White said.

In fact, Vidalia’s shelter will be considered, in White’s words, “shelter of last resort.”

Louisiana has evacuation agreements with its neighboring states, and White said they would have to “fill up Arkansas before they sent them here.”

“The further away you are from the Gulf of Mexico, the better,” he said.

Evacuation traffic through Vidalia should not pick up until after the interstates back up and officials begin to fork traffic onto federal and state highways, but White said he has noticed an increase in RVs and vehicles pulling campers through the area.

Hendricks said that the Office of Homeland Security will set up a command center at the former state welcome center, at 1401 U.S. 84, to coordinate evacuation efforts.

Marketing Director for the Alexandria-based American Red Cross Kyra Hall-Turner said the old welcome center will also serve as a point where evacuees can get more information about evacuations.

Meanwhile, the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office has begun preparing for the storm and the possibility of prisoner evacuations from the southern parts of the state, and has ordered extra food and supplies.

“We are ready to send people to help in south Louisiana and our prisons are ready to accept inmate evacuees if needed,” Sheriff Randy Maxwell said.