Most students took little notice of Hurricane Georges this weekend, but an Iowa State architecture class had to cut short its field trip to New Orleans as the winds and rain roared up the Gulf of Mexico.

“The sun was coming up, but you could see that there was a storm on the horizon,” said Sarah Fletcher, senior in architecture, of the scene in the “Big Easy” Sunday morning.

Georges made landfall near Biloxi, Miss., early Monday morning, battering the coast with 175-mph wind gusts and more than two feet of rain. It weakened to a tropical storm late in the afternoon, thanks to drier air over the Mississippi delta.

More than 60 members of Architecture 401, led by ISU professor Marcy Schulte and three other faculty members, had been in New Orleans since Thursday morning and planned to stay until Monday night.

Their assignment: research an empty lot in the city’s French Quarter and, after returning to Ames, design a hotel for the site.

But when the city fell into the hurricane’s expected path, Schulte decided to leave Sunday.

“I’m very proud of how she managed to get us all out of there,” Fletcher said. “I guarantee it put a few gray hairs on her head.”

As the students boarded buses, residents of New Orleans were calmly taping and boarding up their windows.

“New Orleans is known as the Big Easy, and they were pretty laid back about it. They were like, well if it comes it comes; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” Fletcher said.

“It wasn’t really all that panicky,” she said. “They really should be more concerned — at least I would be, if I was down there.”

But the students were not the only ones leaving town. Thousands of residents clogged Interstates 10 and 55 as they fled the approaching wrath of Georges.

“The interstate was bumper-to-bumper for six hours,” Fletcher said.

After nine hours of slow but steady driving, they reached Tyler, Texas, where the students caught a flight to Dallas.

Most of the class arrived home Sunday night, but a few students stayed overnight in Dallas and took a flight at noon Monday.

The group toured the New Orleans on foot for two days, and on Saturday, Fletcher and her classmates visited the site they would research for their semester project.

“We actually had beautiful weather for three days,” Fletcher said.

She said the professors had not planned to reveal the site until later in the trip, but the schedule was compressed as Georges loomed to the southeast.

“They realized that the storm was coming in,” she said. “That gave us time to go to the site and start doing research.”

To investigate the area, the class divided up into groups. Fletcher said students studied building codes, the elevations of nearby structures and the doors, windows and other details of the surrounding neighborhood.

“I was very impressed with the architecture,” she said. “The wrought iron down there is just beautiful. It’s an amazing city, with a life of its own.”

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Some information for this article was contributed by the Associated Press.