WWW- Three years ago, the New Orleans Times-Picayune won journalism awards for an exhaustive five-part series called “Washing Away,” which began with the words: “It’s only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable every day.” (Read the series.)

This week, the newspaper is living its own prophecy. When Hurricane Katrina hit the city Monday, the staff of the Times-Picayune kept publishing using its Internet Web site. Citizens sent in their own firsthand accounts and readers posted queries to message boards, organized according to neighborhoods, searching for friends and relatives.

The Web site, nola.com, used stories from the Associated Press and even linked to 2002’s “Washing Away” series, which said the area was becoming more vulnerable because of rising seas, sinking land, difficulties in evacuation and a number of other factors. By early evening yesterday, the Web site included an update on game travel plans by Tulane University’s football team to Southern Methodist University, just clicks away from photographs of looters and headlines such as “Martial Law Declared.”

Many of the Times-Picayune’s readers had evacuated from New Orleans, so the Web site emerged as an information lifeline, as well as for others around the country. Power outages in the hurricane-affected region, however, limited those who read the online version of the paper.

Yesterday as the hurricane passed but the water continued to rise in the city, the staff was forced to evacuate its downtown headquarters near the Superdome, interrupting postings to the Internet site by Times-Picayune reporters for several hours. However, the site remained in operation as editors for the online arm of New-York-based Advance Publications Inc., owner of the Times-Picayune, continued to make postings to nola.com.

Managing Editor Dan Shea said that many staff members, including him, were continuing to work knowing that their homes in New Orleans have been flooded out. “There’s massive flooding, sometimes above the first floor,” he wrote in a text message yesterday.

About 300 staff members piled into newspaper delivery trucks, fighting through four feet of water in some places, Mr. Shea wrote. “We know the city and understood what was happening. It was leave immediately, or be trapped and helpless,” he said.

One staff group drove 60 miles southwest to the offices of the Houma Courier, a newspaper owned by New York Times Co., that the Times-Picayune had helped out in the past. Most of the rest of the staff, including Editor Jim Amoss and Publisher Ashton Phelps Jr., later went on to Baton Rouge, La.

“The good news is they’ve made it out of the city,” said Steve Newhouse, chairman of Advance.Net, which oversees strategy for Advance.

Baton Rouge is on higher ground. “When they are up and running, we’ll probably move there,” said Mr. Shea. “Once we got across the [Mississippi] river, we sent a team of reporters and photographers back in and we are receiving reports from them.”

Staff-written stories resumed on the site yesterday afternoon and another online edition of the paper was expected to publish today. Readers will be urged to share their stories and photos.

It wasn’t known when the Times-Picayune will appear in paper-and-ink form again, or even when more readers in New Orleans would have the electricity to read the paper online. The Picayune newspaper, first published in 1837, was named for the 6¼-cent Spanish coin it then cost, according to the paper’s Web site. “We understand the local market ability to access this is limited and in a lot of cases, none,” says Mr. Territo. “We feel that people who have relocated, we’re providing a service for them and for people across the country who have ties to New Orleans.”

Mr. Shea said: “We will not miss a day of publishing, if the brave people whom I’ve lived with for the last two days can help it. Most of our readers are now outside of the city and we can reach them on the Internet. We also want to restart some printing and get papers to the residents left behind.”