PAIN LINGERS
With little power, fuel or food, in Louisiana, long after Ida struck...
Days after the remnants of Hurricane Ida pounded the Northeast with record-breaking rainfall and brutal winds, police continued to look for more victims Friday in what has become the deadliest storm to hit the region since Sandy nine years ago.
More than 1,000 miles away, meanwhile, residents in New Orleans struggled to find basic services as officials warned them that power wouldn’t be fully restored in the city until the middle of next week — at least 10 days after Ida slammed Louisiana as a Category 4 storm.
The powerful hurricane knocked out power to more than a million homes in the New Orleans area when it made landfall last weekend.
More than 800,000 remained in the dark Friday afternoon, according to the website PowerOutages.us.
Officials with Entergy, the company that provides electricity to the city and other parts of southeast Louisiana, said almost all lights should be back on by Wednesday.
The storm killed about a dozen people in the South before causing an even higher death toll in the Northeast — even as it was downgraded to a tropical depression.
Ida’s remnants sparked tornadoes in New Jersey, turned highways and the New York City subway system into rivers and swamped numerous basements and homes in the area, killing at least 49 people.
Fifteen of those deaths happened in New York state, including 11 city residents who were trapped in their low-lying apartments.
New Jersey saw the highest toll, with at least 25 confirmed deaths, while Pennsylvania had at least four and Connecticut saw one — a state trooper who was swept away by floodwaters.
Several people remain unaccounted for, prompting teams of police officers to go knocking on doors in search of additional victims.
In some of the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana, residents who evacuated during the storm were advised to delay their return or be prepared to face lingering power outages, gas and food shortages, a lack of running water and poor cell phone service.
“Residents can return to the parish outside of curfew times but are advised to come prepared with all provisions necessary to self-sustain,” the sheriff’s office in Lafourche Parish said in a Facebook post.
On Friday morning, about two-thirds of gas stations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans were without fuel, according to GasBuddy, a travel and navigation app tracking gas data nationwide.
Despite its projection for New Orleans, Entergy has not said when power would be fully restored to the parishes outside the city.
“Please know that thousands of employees and contractors are currently in the field working day and night to restore power. We will continue working until every community is restored,” said Rod West, a group president for utility operations.
President Biden visited the state Friday to survey the hurricane damage and meet with local leaders.
Also in Louisiana, health officials confirmed they were investigating the deaths of four nursing home residents who were among hundreds taken to a warehouse in Independence.
Investigators have been told that some of those people were lying on mattresses on the floor, were not fed or changed and not kept at a safe distance from each other to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Three of those deaths were described in a coroner’s report as storm-related.
The owner of the nursing homes, identified as Bob Dean, reportedly turned health inspectors away when they showed up to see the warehouse.
Dean told local news station WAFB that the inspectors were on his property illegally.
“We only had five deaths within the six days, and normally with 850 people, you’ll have a couple a day,” he said, “so we did really good.”