Some Ida evacuees urged to return
Power due back for New Orleans, but outside city to wait
NEW ORLEANS — With power due back for almost all of New Orleans by this week, Mayor LaToya Cantrell strongly encouraged residents who evacuated because of Hurricane Ida to begin returning home. But outside the city, the prospects of recovery appeared bleaker, with no timeline on power restoration and homes and businesses in tatters.
Six days after Hurricane Ida made landfall, hardhit parts of Louisiana were still struggling to restore any sense of normalcy. Even around New Orleans, a continued lack of power for most residents made a sultry stretch of summer hard to bear and added to woes in the aftermath of Ida. Louisiana authorities searched Friday for a man they said shot another man to death after they both waited in a line to fill up at a gas station in suburban New Orleans.
Cantrell said the city would offer transportation starting Saturday to any resident looking to leave the city and get to a public shelter. It already began moving residents out of senior homes.
At the Renaissance Place senior home Friday, dozens of residents lined up to get on minibuses equipped with wheelchair lifts after city officials said they determined conditions at the facility were not safe.
Reggie Brown, 68, was
among those waiting to join fellow residents on a bus. He said residents, many in wheelchairs, have been stuck at the facility since Ida. Elevators stopped working three days ago and garbage was piling up inside, he said. The residents were being taken to a state-run shelter, the mayor’s office said.
“I’m getting on the last bus,” Brown said. “I’m able-bodied.”
A phone message for the company that manages the Renaissance site, HSI Management Inc., was not immediately returned.
But Cantrell also encouraged residents to return to the city as their power comes
back, saying they could help the relief effort by taking in neighbors and family who were still in the dark. Only a small number of city residents had power back by Friday though almost all electricity should return by Wednesday, according to Entergy, the company that provides power to New Orleans and much of southeast Louisiana in the storm’s path.
“We are saying, you can come home,” Cantrell told a news conference.
The outlook was not as promising south and west of the city, where Ida’s fury fully struck. The sheriff ’s office in Lafourche Parish
cautioned returning residents about the difficult situation that awaited them — no power, no running water, little cellphone service and almost no gasoline.
Ida damaged or destroyed more than 22,000 power poles, more than hurricanes Katrina, Zeta and Delta combined, an impact Entergy President and CEO Phillip May called “staggering.” More than 5,200 transformers failed and nearly 26,000 spans of wire — the stretch of transmission wires between poles — were down.
“The level of devastation makes it quite difficult or near impossible to get in and
fully assess some places,” said May of five southeastern Louisiana parishes facing the longest delays. The company is estimating full power restoration by Sept. 29 or even longer for some customers, although May said that was a “no later than” date with the hope of earlier restoration.
One of those parishes is Terrebonne, where volunteers in the parish seat of Houma handed out ice, water and meals to shellshocked storm survivors on Saturday. Houma is roughly 55 miles southwest of New Orleans.
Among those in need was 26-year-old Kendall Duthu of Dulac, who collected a container of red beans and rice, pulling over an Infiniti with a shattered windshield to eat.
Duthu has been living in his car, with his girlfriend, since the storm hit. He was once a cook at a jambalaya restaurant, but the pandemic claimed that job.
Duthu, a diabetic, lost his house in the storm and doesn’t know what’s next.
“Next stop, I don’t really ...” he said, trailing off. “We’ve just been living day by day.”
President Joe Biden on Friday surveyed the damage in some of those spots, touring a neighborhood in LaPlace, a community between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain that suffered catastrophic wind and water damage that sheared off roofs and flooded homes.
“I promise we’re going to have your back,” Biden said at a briefing by officials.
The president has also promised full federal support to the Northeast, where Ida’s remnants dumped record-breaking rain and killed at least 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut.
At least 14 deaths were blamed on the storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including those of three nursing home residents who were evacuated along with hundreds of other seniors to a warehouse in Louisiana ahead of the hurricane.
State health officials have launched an investigation into those deaths and a fourth one in Tangipahoa Parish, where they say conditions became unhealthy and unsafe.