New Orleans in dark as Ida thrashes coast
1 death reported; storm’s surge sends river in reverse
NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Ida blasted ashore Sunday as one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S., knocking out power to all of New Orleans, blowing off roofs and reversing the flow of the Mississippi River as it rushed from the Louisiana coast toward one of the nation’s most important industrial corridors.
The Category 4 storm hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years earlier, coming ashore about 45 miles west of where the Category 3 Katrina first struck land. Ida’s 150 mph winds, just shy of the 157 mph winds of a Category 5 storm, tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. It dropped hours later to a Category 1 storm with maximum winds of 95 mph as it crawled inland, its eye 45 miles west of New Orleans.
Near the area where Ida made landfall, the National Hurricane Center was predicting “potentially catastrophic” wind damage and an “extremely life-threatening” ocean surge. Devastating effects from winds and flooding could extend more than 100 miles inland, experts said.
The entire city of New Orleans was without power late Sunday, according to city officials. The city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said on Twitter that the Entergy utility company confirmed that the only power in the city was coming from generators. The message included a screen shot that cited “catastrophic transmission damage” for the power failure.
The city relies on Entergy for backup power for the pumps that remove stormwater from city streets. Rain from Ida is expected to test that pump system.
More than 1 million customers were without power in Louisiana, and over 40,000 were in the dark in Mississippi, according to PowerOutage. US, which tracks outages nationwide.
The Ascension Parish sheriff’s office reported the first death from Ida late Sunday, saying in a Facebook post that deputies responding to a report of someone injured by a fallen tree at a home in Prairieville confirmed the person’s death. Prairieville is a suburb of Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge.
The Facebook post did not include the person’s name or any other details.
Elsewhere, engineers detected a “negative flow” on the Mississippi River as a result of the storm surge, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Ricky Boyette said.
The rising ocean swamped the barrier island of Grand Isle as landfall came just to the west at Port Fourchon. Ida made a second landfall about two hours later near Galliano. The hurricane was churning through the far southern Louisiana wetlands, with the more than 2 million people living in and around New Orleans and Baton Rouge under threat.
“This is going to be much stronger than we usually see and, quite frankly, if you had to draw up the worst possible path for a hurricane in Louisiana, it would be something very, very close to what we’re seeing,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said.
Edwards warned that conditions were extremely hazardous. “Nobody should be expecting that, tonight, a first responder is going to be able to answer a call for help,” he said.
People in Louisiana woke up to a monster storm after Ida’s top winds grew by 45 mph in five hours as the hurricane moved through the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico.
Winds tore at awnings and water spilled out of Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans on Sunday, and boats broke loose from their moorings.
“The storm surge is just tremendous. We can see the roofs have been blown off of the port buildings in many places,” Edwards said.
“Hopefully there is really nobody there — that’s all I can hope for,” said Kevin Gilmore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Officials said Ida’s swift intensification from a few thunderstorms to a major hurricane in just three days left no time to organize a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans’ 390,000 residents. Mayor LaToya Cantrell urged residents remaining in the city Sunday to “hunker down.”
“This is the time to stay inside,” Cantrell said. “Do not venture out. No sightseeing.”
Marco Apostolico said he felt confident riding out the storm at his home in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest when levees failed and released a torrent of floodwater during Katrina.
His home was among those rebuilt with the help of actor Brad Pitt to withstand hurricane-force winds. But the memory of Katrina still hung over the latest storm.
“It’s obviously a lot of heavy feelings,” he said. “And, yeah, potentially scary and dangerous.”
The hurricane is projected to turn north by this morning as it loses strength over land but produces extremely heavy rainfall.
COVID COMPLICATIONS
The region getting Ida’s worst is an area that is already reeling from a resurgence of covid-19 infections a result of low vaccination rates and the highly contagious delta variant.
In recent days, there have been more than 2,500 people hospitalized with covid-19 across the state, nearing the previous record. Edwards said Sunday that the situation had complicated disaster planning.
“Evacuating these large hospitals is not an option, because there are not any other hospitals with the capacity to take them,” he said.
New Orleans hospitals planned to ride out the storm with their beds nearly full. And shelters for those fleeing their homes carried an added risk of becoming flash points for new infections.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, said Sunday that he worried Ida could worsen the already dire coronavirus situation in Southern states.
“You’re having two potential or real catastrophes conflating on each other,” Fauci said.
Fauci described the coronavirus situation in Louisiana as “bad enough,” and the hurricane threatened to make it worse, though he said Edwards was “doing a very good job in trying to keep things under control.”
The area is also home to petrochemical sites and major ports, which could sustain significant damage.
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality was in contact with more than 1,500 oil refineries, chemical plants and other sensitive facilities and will respond to any reported pollution leaks or petroleum spills, agency spokesman Greg Langley said. He said the agency would deploy three mobile air-monitoring laboratories after the storm passes to sample, analyze and report any threats to public health.
Louisiana’s 17 oil refineries account for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. refining capacity and its two liquefied natural gas export terminals ship about 55% of the nation’s total exports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Louisiana is also home to two nuclear power plants, one near New Orleans and another about 27 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.
SPECTER OF KATRINA
Comparisons to the Aug. 29, 2005, landfall of Katrina weighed heavily on residents bracing for Ida. Katrina was blamed for 1,800 deaths as it caused levee breaches and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. Ida’s hurricane-force winds stretched 50 miles from the storm’s eye, or about half the size of Katrina, and a New Orleans infrastructure official emphasized that the city is in a “very different place than it was 16 years ago.”
The levee system has been extensively overhauled since Katrina, Ramsey Green, deputy chief administrative officer for infrastructure, said before the worst of the storm hit.
New Orleans officials said Sunday that they are confident their levee system will not fail as it did in Hurricane Katrina, allowing water to surge into the city. Their main worry: torrential rains.
While water may not penetrate levees, Green said if forecasts of up to 20 inches of rain prove true, the city’s underfunded and neglected network of pumps, underground pipes and surface canals likely won’t be able to keep up.
Leaders warned that the hurricane would cut people off from some city services.
President Joe Biden approved emergency declarations for Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of Ida’s arrival. He said Sunday the country was praying for the best for Louisiana and would put its “full might behind the rescue and recovery” effort.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Edwards warned his state to brace for potentially weeks of recovery.
“There is no doubt that the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely difficult for our state, and many, many people are going to be tested in ways that we can only imagine,” Edwards said.
MISSISSIPPI ON ALERT
In Gulfport, Mississippians woke up to tornado warnings in Hancock County and rain on Sunday morning. U.S. 90 was quickly inundated by a storm surge, and some neighborhoods are dealing with water in low-lying areas, but most were faring well.
Harrison County, which includes the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, initiated a curfew at 8 a.m. Sunday until further notice. Hancock County’s curfew begins at 6 p.m. Sunday and ends at 6 a.m. today. Six shelters are open in Harrison County and emergency personnel are in place should high-water rescues become necessary. About 150-200 people are in Harrison County shelters.
Area residents are accustomed to storms and are generally prepared to take care of themselves and one another, Harrison County Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said.
He credited the curfews, along with the closure of local casinos, with keeping people off the roads, but he cautioned that while all seems calm right now, flooding will remain a concern, even as the storm moves northward.
“The storm is not over yet,” Sullivan said. “We don’t know what the back side of this storm is going to bring, so we have to be prepared for the next phase. You can’t let your guard down. There may be river flooding and street flooding, so we don’t want people going out.”
“I tell people all the time that we have a PhD in storm prep because of Katrina,” Sullivan said. “Most of the people that live on the [Mississippi] coast know what to do and when to evacuate. A lot of times we don’t have to say anything to them, because they’re way ahead of us. They’re smart, they’ve been through this before. They know how to take care of themselves, and we take care of one another.”
Information for this article was contributed by Kevin McGill, Jay Reeves, Rebecca Santana, Stacey Plaisance, Janet McConnaughey, Emily Wagster Pettus, Jeff Martin, Seth Borenstein, Frank Bajak, Michael Biesecker, Pamela Sampson and Jeffrey Collins of The Associated Press; by Richard Fausset, Sarah Mervosh and Rick Rojas of The New York Times; and by Jason Samenow, Matthew Cappucci, Hannah Knowles, Brittany Shammas and Kasha Patel of The Washington Post.