BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Supplies ran low Friday as Louisiana residents who emptied refrigerators of food thawed by power outages caused by Hurricane Gustav waited in lines around the state for food, water and ice.

Gov. Bobby Jindal said he pressed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to speed up deliveries to the four dozen distribution sites set up by the Louisiana National Guard to hand out boxes of meals-ready-to-eat, bags of ice, packages of water and tarps to patch storm-battered roofs.

As widespread outages continued to leave one-third of the state's utility customers without power, the governor enlisted the help of Louisiana public schools and colleges, asking them to bring in their food contractors to prepare hot meals for several of the "points of distribution," called PODs.

"I'm getting ice and water, something to eat. I had to throw away maybe $800 worth of food this morning. It's miserable," said Tyrone Green, 46, a north Baton Rouge resident who rolled a grocery cart through a National Guard supply line in a store parking lot. "No more bottled water, no more ice, nothing to eat, just rock bottom."

Green stood in a line that moved quickly, but as people filled up their grocery baskets and returned to their cars, new people continued to arrive.

Cindy Cook, 54, got two boxes of MREs, one tarp, two bags of ice and water.

One of the lucky few in the Baton Rouge area to have power, Cook said she had two holes in her roof and a house full of people trying to escape their own un-air-conditioned, powerless homes.

She said though she prepared for Gustav, she's run out of food and scoured stores looking for basics, to no avail.

"Nowhere can you find bread. You can't find cold cuts, any kind of meat," she said.

Gustav was a Category 2 storm with 110-mph winds when it made landfall at Cocodrie on Monday. While it largely spared New Orleans, the storm shredded the power grid in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes and the Baton Rouge area, prompted boil advisories for water in two-thirds of the state's parishes and caused flooding in parts of central and north Louisiana that rarely see the effects of hurricanes.

In Houma, near the epicenter of Gustav's damage in south Louisiana, Danny and Norma Matherne waited for supplies at the National Guard distribution site at the local civic center. It was their second trip to the civic center for water, MREs and ice.

"We're just very thankful we have a house to come home to," said Danny Matherne, 43.

Jindal said FEMA expected more supply deliveries late Friday, but he said he was trying to enlist other groups for aid as well because power outages were expected in areas hardest hit by Gustav for up to a month.

"Our concern is when you look at the estimates for Baton Rouge, when you look at the estimates for how long it's going to take to restore power to several of these communities, there's going to be continued demand for quite some time," the governor said.

Meg Casper, a spokeswoman for the Board of Regents that governs higher education in Louisiana, said the state-run Recovery School District in New Orleans was cooking 2,500 hot meals Friday for city residents and would provide 15,000 meals both Saturday and Sunday. LSU, Southern University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette also were preparing food, she said.

That's on top of thousands of meals the Red Cross was serving to families around the state, and Jindal said he asked faith-based groups to set up kitchens in storm-damaged parishes as well. "We want to make sure there are sufficient supplies and provisions for our people," Jindal said.

The Red Cross was setting up mobile kitchen locations in multiple parishes, with plans for an eventual capacity of handing out 385,000 meals per day, said Eric Jones, a disaster operations worker for the agency.

Meanwhile, the state continued to buy generators Friday to loan to gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies that didn't have power. Jindal hoped to have 400 generators -- with an estimated $20 million price tag -- delivered to parishes by this weekend to help restart shuttered businesses. More than 200 had been purchased as of Friday, he said.

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Mike Kunzelman contributed to this report from Houma.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)