Louisianians face weeks with no power, utility says
Evacuees urged to just stay away
Electricity is still out to more than 1 million customers and a punishing heat is settling over southern Louisiana, as officials warned Tuesday that recovery from Hurricane Ida could take days or even weeks, and searchand-rescue efforts continued for people still stranded in the storm’s aftermath.
At least five deaths have been attributed to the storm.
Gov. John Bel Edwards, who said he expects the death toll to rise, put the situation in stark terms and offered no timeline for when the state will be able to welcome back residents who fled the storm.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us, and no one is under the illusion that this is going to be a short process,” Edwards said Tuesday.
“Many of the life-supporting infrastructure elements are not present. They’re not operating right now,” he said. “So if you have already evacuated, do not return here or elsewhere in southeast Louisiana until the office of emergency preparedness tells you it’s ready to receive you.”
The situation has grown dire enough for those who remained in New Orleans that city officials have not ruled out a post-storm evacuation.
But for now, their efforts Tuesday were focused on getting resources to residents, including tarpaulins, food, water and ice. Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city was dealing with issues “step by step, one day at a time.”
“We know it’s hot, we know we don’t have any power,” the mayor said during a news conference Tuesday, adding that the main power company, Entergy, had yet to give a timeline for restoring electricity to the city.
“We are not even there yet to tell you what day” the lights will come back on, the mayor said.
All eight transmission lines that deliver power to the city were knocked out of service by Ida. In Mississippi, about 60,000 customers lacked electricity, according to reports compiled by PowerOutage.us.
Inability to run air-conditioning threatened to become a dangerous problem for vulnerable residents of the region, as heat and humidity made the air in much of southern Louisiana and Mississippi feel hotter than 100 degrees Tuesday.
New Orleans officials announced seven places around the city where people could get meals and sit in air conditioning. The city was also using 70 transit buses as cooling sites and will have drive-thru food, water and ice distribution locations set up today, Cantrell said.
About 441,000 people in 17 parishes had no water, and an additional 319,000 were under boil-water advisories, federal officials said.
Edwards said state officials also were working to set up food, water and ice distribution. The governor’s office also said discussions were underway about establishing cooling stations and places where people on oxygen could plug in their machines.
“While the power’s down and we are dependent on generators, I’m calling on all our people and businesses in the city to be good neighbors,” Cantrell said. “Share the power you have, open your business so people can recharge their devices.”
The mayor also ordered a nighttime curfew Tuesday, calling it an effort to prevent crime with the city in darkness. Police Chief Shaun Fer- guson said there had been some arrests for stealing.
GOVERNOR’S WARNING
Like the governor, local officials warned residents who left ahead of the storm to stay away for now. Basic services like emergency response, and everyday amenities of modern life like water, sewage and passable roadways, could not be guaranteed in many places, they said.
About half of the city’s population of 390,000 is believed to have evacuated in advance of the storm.
Those still there surveyed the damage and expressed a lingering feeling of having been hit by something far stronger than they expected.
“Katrina was a picnic for us, compared to what this one was,” said Ronald Dufrene, 63, who rode out the storm in his 103-foot steel shrimp boat on the bayou near his home in Jean Lafitte.
Many houses around his suffered roof damage, and some that were supported on low concrete pilings had “drifted off,” he said, and were now awkwardly perched in neighbors’ yards. “It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” Dufrene said.
In Louisiana, a man was killed while driving in New Orleans; a woman was found dead in Jean Lafitte, south of the city; and a man was killed in Prairieville, about 20 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, where a tree fell on a house. In Mississippi, two people were killed and 10 were injured when a highway collapsed.
Additionally, in Slidell, La., crews searched for a 71-yearold man who was attacked by an alligator that tore off his arm as he walked through Ida’s floodwaters. His wife pulled him to the steps of the home and paddled away to get help, but when she returned, he was gone, authorities said.
Officials expressed satisfaction that the levee system around New Orleans, upgraded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to better protect the city from flooding, had done its job.
But two days after the storm, the relief that residents might have felt at having dodged one devastating possibility dissipated in the sweltering heat and the dispiriting search for an open store to buy basics.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” said Gerardo Caal, 41. “There’s no food. And we don’t have electricity to cook.”
Ida, now a tropical depression, produced strong rains across the Middle Tennessee Valley on Tuesday as it moved northeast, and meteorologists issued a flash flood watch for the area, which is still reeling from severe flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred. Ida and its threat of flooding were expected to reach the Mid-Atlantic states today, with the potential for 3-6 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Center said.
POWER OUT WEEKS
Entergy said Tuesday that customers in “the hardest-hit areas could experience power outages for weeks,” and some local Louisiana officials warned that they could last as long as a month.
The governor expressed frustration with that prospect.
“I’m not satisfied with 30 days, the Entergy people aren’t satisfied with 30 days, nobody who’s out there needing power is satisfied with that,” Edwards said. “But I am mindful that we just had the strongest hurricane — at least tied for the strongest — that the state has ever experienced, and infrastructure has been damaged.”
Edwards added that the power issues could become major problems for hospitals, which have been dealing with a surge of covid-19 patients and have been relying on generators since Sunday. Several had to be evacuated Monday.
“I’m worried about it, because that’s how we run our hospitals too, and our hospitals are full,” he said.
More than 25,000 workers from at least 32 states are mobilized to assist with power restoration efforts.
The widespread outages mean spoiled food in refrigerators, no air conditioning and limited ability to recharge devices. Gas stations without power won’t be able to pump gasoline.
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 the $14.5 billion restoration after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. The city escaped the kind of flooding from the 2005 storm that destroyed entire neighborhoods, 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,” Cantrell said.
But even as the area’s flood-prevention infrastructure absorbed Ida’s blow, the power grid collapsed. The storm’s ferocious winds, measuring 150 mph at landfall, not only took out all of the transmission lines but 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.
While the levees’ resilience is no doubt because of 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.
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 will be fully restored, West said. About 115,000 homes and businesses across Louisiana and Mississippi had power restored Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.
The loss of electricity will have other affects as well. Sewer substations, for example, need power to keep wastewater moving, said Ghassan Korban, executive director of the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board. The storm knocked out power to about 80 of the city’s 84 pumping stations, he said. “Without electricity, wastewater backs up and can cause overflows,” he said, adding that residents should conserve water to lessen stress on the system.
ROAD GONE
In southeastern Mississippi, Barbara Cochran said she was about to get ready for bed late Monday when she heard a crash outside. Hurricane Ida had been dumping torrential rain, her husband was already asleep and the air conditioner was humming loudly.
The 83-year-old retired educator said she went out onto the porch to see if a big oak tree had fallen, or if an 18-wheeler had slid off the highway down the hill from their home. She didn’t see car lights, so she didn’t think there was a wreck.
About 10 minutes after she went back in, she heard a second crash. Moments later, Cochran heard a third crash. As she was about to call the sheriff’s office, she heard the wail of sirens.
And, she said: “I heard something that sounded like a woman screaming.”
It was traffic crashes on a damaged road.
Two people were killed and at least 10 were injured when seven vehicles plunged, one after another, into a deep hole where the dark, rural highway collapsed as the hurricane blew through Mississippi, authorities said Tuesday.
Heavy rainfall may have caused the collapse of the two-lane Mississippi Highway 26 west of Lucedale, and the drivers may not have seen that the roadway in front of them had disappeared, Mississippi Highway Patrol Cpl. Cal Robertson said. The George County sheriff’s office received the first call about 10:30 p.m.
Cochran said she didn’t know about the highway collapse or the wrecks until after she woke from a fitful night’s sleep.
“This is such a catastrophe,” she said Tuesday. She said she is praying for the families of those killed or hurt.
Robertson said some of the vehicles ended up stacked on top of one another as they crashed into the abyss, which opened up in the rural area that lacked street lights.
Ida dumped as much as 13 inches of rain as it blew through Mississippi, the National Weather Service said.
State troopers, emergency workers and rescue teams responded to the crash site about 60 miles northeast of Biloxi to find both the eastbound and westbound lanes collapsed. Robertson said the hole removed 50-60 feet of roadway and is 20-30 feet deep.
George County Sheriff Keith Havard said the sheriff’s office received a 911 call from a man whose car had plunged into the hole.
“He said he was driving, and all of a sudden he wasn’t driving anymore,” Havard said. “He didn’t understand what had happened. I can’t imagine anyone would.”
Information for this article was contributed by J. David Goodman and Sophie Kasakove of The New York Times; by David R. Baker, Josh Saul and Will Wade of Bloomberg News (TNS); and by Emily Wagster Pettus, Rogelio V. Solis, Kevin McGill, Chevel Johnson, Melinda Deslatte, Janet McConnaughey, Rebecca Santana, Stacey Plaisance, Jay Reeves, Alina Hartounian, Travis Loller, Sudhin Thanawala, Jeff Martin and Jeffrey Collins of The Associated Press.