Senior feared dead after alligator attack in flooded waters
Hurricane Ida death toll at least five
A 71-year-old man is missing, feared dead, after an alligator ripped off his arm as he waded through flood water outside his Louisiana home following Hurricane Ida.
The unnamed man was standing in several feet of water in his garden shed when he was attacked, and called to his wife for help.
She managed to drag him to the front steps of their home in Slidell, north of New Orleans, and then set off by boat to get medical supplies because there was no phone signal after the power grid was knocked out.
When she returned, her husband had disappeared.
The local sheriff’s office used boats and high-water vehicles to search for the man but have not yet found him.
The couple’s house is set in marshland on a wildlife reserve, home to a vast number of alligators, and is one of thousands deluged by flood water.
Randy Smith, of the St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s office, warned residents to be “extra vigilant” while walking in flooded areas because the storm may have displaced wildlife, pushing alligators and other animals toward neighbourhoods.
At least five people are now known to have died and more than one million people are without power in Mississippi and Louisiana following one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the United States. It made landfall on Sunday with 240 kilometre-an-hour winds.
One man died while driving in New Orleans, and a woman was found dead in the fishing village of Jean Lafitte, a town on Bayou Barataria.
Another man was killed when a tree fell on his house in Ascension Parish, in Louisiana’s Baton Rouge area.
Near the town of Lucedale in Mississippi, two people were killed and 10 were injured when part of a highway washed away, causing several vehicles to fall into a trench.
Three of those hurt remain in critical condition.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 23 years in law enforcement,” Trooper Cal Robertson of the Mississippi Highway Patrol said in an interview with CNN.
Communities beginning the huge task of clearing debris and repairing the damage inflicted by Ida are facing the prospect of weeks without electricity in the oppressive, late-summer heat.
Ida ravaged the region’s power grid, leaving all of New Orleans and hundreds of thousands of other Louisiana residents in the dark with no clear timeline on when the electricity would come back on.
The storm’s ferocious winds took out all eight transmission lines that deliver power to New Orleans, snapped utility poles in half and crumpled at least one steel transmission tower into a twisted metal heap, blacking out the entire city.
Utility executives say it’s impossible to tell how long it will take to fix.
“I can’t tell you when the power is going to be restored. I can’t tell you when all the debris is going to be cleaned up and repairs made,” said John Bel Edwards, the governor of Louisiana.
“But what I can tell you is we are going to work hard every day to deliver as much assistance as we can.”
The governor added that 25,000 utility workers were on the ground in the state to help restore electricity, with more on the way.
Still, his office described damage to the power grid as “catastrophic” and officials said it could be weeks before electricity is restored in some spots.
As difficult as the days ahead will be, many local officials expressed relief that the situation wasn’t worse. New Orleans’ levees, flood gates and pumps held fast even as Ida dumped more than a foot of rain on the region, passing their biggest test since a $14.5-billion restoration after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.
New Orleans escaped the kind of flooding from the 2005 storm that destroyed entire neighbourhoods, left parts uninhabitable for months and claimed 1,800 lives.
“We did not have another Katrina, and that’s something we should all be thankful for,” Mayor Latoya Cantrell said Monday at a news conference.
While the levees’ resilience is no doubt due to the rebuilding effort that followed Katrina, the starkly different outcomes also stem from the storms’ different characteristics. Katrina slammed the coast with a 30-foot storm surge of ocean water, while preliminary estimates from Ida put its surge far lower. Ida’s winds, however, were stronger than Katrina’s, and that’s what ultimately took out so many power lines.
“Katrina was a water event — this was the opposite,” said Rod West, group president of utility operations for Entergy Corp.
While it’s likely some customers will have power restored this week, the company needs to do a full assessment of the damage before knowing when the system would fully be restored and how much it would cost, West said.
About 115,000 homes and businesses across Louisiana and Mississippi had power restored Monday, according to Poweroutage.us.
On Monday, rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-clearance trucks brought more than 670 people trapped by flood water to safety. Crews planned to go door-to-door in the hardest-hit areas. Also stuck in New Orleans were tourists who did not escape before the storm.
The airport cancelled all incoming and outgoing commercial flights for a third day, saying the lack of power and water meant no air conditioning or lavatories were working.
Adding to the misery is the stifling weather. A heat advisory was issued for New Orleans and the rest of the region, with forecasters saying the combination of high temperatures and humidity made it feel like 41C Tuesday.
Now downgraded to a tropical storm, Ida has continued to bring heavy rain and flooding to parts of the Tennessee and Ohio valleys.
Flash flooding and mudslides are possible around Washington, D.C., Thursday and in New England on Friday.