Hurricane Ida slammed Louisiana with devastating force as a Category 4 hurricane Sunday, leaving at least one person dead and more than one million customers without power as it flooded homes, ripped off roofs and trapped residents in dangerous rising waters.
While the scope of the damage won’t be clear until day breaks Monday and teams can assess the chaos, initial reports indicate the situation for many residents who stayed behind is dire.
The storm slowed after it made landfall around 1 p.m. ET Sunday near Port Fourchon, delivering catastrophic winds and torrential rains for hours.
Ida weakened to a tropical storm early Monday with sustained winds of 60 mph and the continued threat of life-threatening flash flooding.
“We’ve suffered flooding before. We suffered storms before. But I’ve never seen water like this in my life. It just hit us in the worst way possible and it was such a massive storm that it just totally devastated us,” said Tim Kerner Jr, mayor of Jean Lafitte, south of New Orleans.
Levees were overtopped in his city and residents were forced to their roofs, waiting for rescue boats to arrive, Kerner said.
“We’re going to make sure we get as many boats as possible,” to assist with rescues, he said, adding that boats were ready to move in as soon as the weather broke. “It really breaks your heart when you know those people and you can’t get to those people.”
Ida slammed into Louisiana on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, tying with 2020’s Hurricane Laura and the Last Island Hurricane of 1856 as the strongest ever to hit the state.
More than one million customers in Louisiana were without power as of early Monday morning, according to PowerOutage.US. Among them is all of Orleans Parish, which was hit with “catastrophic transmission damage,” the city office said in a Tweet Sunday night. More than 105,000 customers were without power in Mississippi, PowerOutage.US reported.
Entergy Louisiana said some of its customers could be without power for weeks. And the storm surge of up to 15 feet and winds as strong as 150 mph could leave parts of southeast Louisiana “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” according to a local hurricane statement from the National Weather Service in New Orleans