Friday night the top sustained winds were 115 mph, and NO was still on the far west edge of the projected path. They were talking about a possible landfall on the Florida panhandle. They said that some further strengthening was possible, but no one was forecasting it to become a Cat 5 storm overnight, nor that the track would shift substantially farther west.
Excuse me, but look at the maps for Friday. NO was in the cone, not far from the center.
At this point, in a city that everyone knows can be destroyed by a Cat 3, everyone in the city should have been on the alert, and moving resources to high ground.
About ten years ago my town was threatened by one of these. Two days out, my company spent an entire day packing up computers in waterproof bags and putting them under desks in the event of a roof collapse. The storm never hit.
When you are in the cone, you don't take your eye off the storm.