NBC's Lester Holt reports from Braithwaite, La., where Isaac left flooded streets, downed lines and people stranded.
By NBC News staff and wire reports
Updated at 12 p.m. ET: Up to 50,000 people in Louisiana's Tangipahoa Parish were ordered to evacuate Thursday morning when water from Tropical Storm Isaac threatened to overwhelm a dam across the state line in Mississippi.
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Residents were given just 90 minutes to leave, parish spokesman Jeff McKneely told NBC affiliate WDSU-TV.
The parish said "imminent failure" of the dam was expected.
Mississippi officials, however, said they didn't think the volume of water in the 700-acre lake at Percy Quin State Park near McComb, Miss., would add enough flow to threaten communities downstream.
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Earlier, hundreds of people were evacuated in darkness overnight while new areas in southern Louisiana flooded as slow-moving Tropical Storm Isaac crawled north. Its eye was heading toward Arkansas, but its heaviest rain bands were now moving over Mississippi.
"We still have people penned in both (Plaquemines and St. John) parishes," Lt. Col. Michael Kazmierzak, a Louisiana National Guard spokesman, told The Weather Channel Thursday morning. "We're still assisting with evacuations in both of those parishes."
"The big thing we've been doing through the night is with St. John's," he said. "We've assisted locals with evacuations of more than 3,000 people" there.
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"The weather was definitely a major part of the difficulty," he added, "but when you get into darkness that creates a problem of its own, just being able to see and identify where the people are located."
Protected by federal levees, central New Orleans appeared to have escaped the worst of the storm, but rural areas of Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi were swamped and power outages widespread.
The first death from Isaac was reported in Mississippi early Thursday. A tow-truck driver died after a tree fell on his cab while he was trying to move a large tree from a main street in Picayune.
In Slidell, La., areas that had never flooded, including during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saw up to five feet of water after drain pumps were overwhelmed. Numerous homes and businesses were swamped.
"Water is currently backing up into the city through Bayou Pattasat," Mayor Freddy Drennan said in a statement on the city's website. "The pumps are currently unable to pump the water out as fast as it's coming in. It is anticipated that until Bayou Bonfouca recedes, the city will continue to be inundated with water."
Slidell is on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans.
Around 750,000 homes and businesses across the two states were without power as of 6:30 a.m. ET Thursday, according to information from energy companies Entergy and Mississippi Power.
The Red Cross said almost 4,000 people were being accommodated in emergency shelters across Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
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Isaac is expected to weaken into a tropical depression later Thursday, but it will still be a soaker for days.
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