The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Carbon monoxide poison, gas shortage add to misery
Louisiana endures its third day of power losses after hurricane.
As Louisiana endured its third day of widespread power losses after Hurricane Ida swept through the state, residents faced compounding effects of the outages, including gas shortages and carbon monoxide poisonings.
Officials said Wednesday at least one Orleans Parish resident is presumed to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning, bringing the number of deaths linked to the storm and its aftermath to at least eight.
President Joe Biden planned to visit Louisiana on Friday to see the damage firsthand, Sen. Bill Cassidy said in a statement. A White House official confirmed the trip without offering details.
As of Wednesday, nearly 1 million customers in Louisiana were still without power, days after Ida tore through the state, causing flooding and knocking out the transmission lines that power New Orleans. Restarting the city’s power station and critical infrastructure such as hospitals are top priorities.
Entergy, Louisiana’s largest utility, announced Wednesday that it had restored electricity to about 11,500 customers in New Orleans, but it could be days longer before it and other Louisiana cities hit hard by Hurricane Ida have full power again.
“This is the first step in returning to normal,” Deanna Rodriguez, the chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, said at a news briefing Wednesday.
Even as that progress was made, the consequences of the outages were apparent. Residents using backup generators to get by risk being sickened by carbon monoxide poisoning if the generators aren’t used correctly.
In addition to the fatality, the New Orleans fire chief, Roman Nelson, said 12 people had been transported to the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning. Three were in critical condition.
At the same time, many people seeking fuel for their cars or home generators, which are often powered by gasoline or diesel, were out of luck.
In Louisiana, many gas stations had run out of fuel by Wednesday, leaving long lines of cars — as well as people on foot, toting empty gas cans, in search of a working pump — snaking through the streets.
And in places like Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans, residents were also contending with a lack of drinking water.
“We do not have the services that a basic community has,” Cynthia Lee Sheng, the parish president, said Tuesday. “These are not conditions to be living in.”
Joshua D. Rhodes, a researcher at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was difficult to predict when power would be fully restored without a full accounting from Entergy on the damage to its system.
“Usually, there is a core that remains,” Rhodes said. “But this is a complete and total blackout.”
He said that he suspected that New Orleans would regain electricity in its main core “relatively soon,” but cautioned that it could take “weeks, if not months” for everyone to get their power back.
Hurricane Ida’s impact extended beyond Louisiana, and the death toll included two 19-year-olds who died in Adger, Alabama, on Tuesday while working to restore power. The men appeared to have been electrocuted, the coroner’s office said.
Ida was moving northeast on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said, bringing the potential for 3 to 8 inches of rain from the Mid-atlantic to southern New England.