Louisiana areas still dark
Three weeks after Hurricane Ida hit, 38,000 remain without electricity.
NEW ORLEANS — Three weeks have passed since Hurricane Ida knocked down electric wires, poles and transmission towers serving more than 1 million people in southeast Louisiana. In New Orleans, power was almost entirely restored by Sept. 10, and businesses and schools have reopened. But outside the city, more than 100,000 customers were without lights through this past Monday. As of Friday evening, there were still about 38,000 customers without power, and many people remained displaced from damaged homes.
As intensifying storms driven by climate change reveal the weakness of electric grids across the United States, severe power outages are becoming an increasingly regular long-term aftershock.
“It so quickly pivots from the disaster itself — the hurricane, the wildfire, the floods,” said Julie McNamara, an energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “So much of the consequences of these extreme weather events are because of those long-lasting power outages.”
For many, getting the lights back on could still be more than a week away: Entergy, the state’s largest utility, estimates that power will be fully restored in the state by Sept. 29, a full month after Ida made landfall. Linemen are scattered across the coast replacing downed wires and poles, but in some areas hit by sustained winds as high as 150 mph, electrical systems will need to be completely rebuilt.
The challenges of weeks without power are wearing on residents. Kelly Walker, who lives in Luling, Louisiana, went almost three weeks with no electricity before the lights were finally restored Friday. Her mother’s small three-bedroom house became a crowded home base to eight people, where a generator tempered the sweltering heat at a cost of often $80 per day in gasoline.
Jobs, schools and daily routines remain on hold across the region. Workers on cherry pickers string new power lines along roads as drivers wait their turn at dead traffic lights. On some residential streets, power lines hang so low that cars just barely scrape under them.
And with every passing day, the already immense task of rebuilding becomes more daunting as rain falls through holes in rooftops and mold spreads.
Taliban replace ministry for women with ‘virtue’:
Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” in the building that once housed the Women’s Affairs Ministry, escorting out World Bank staffers on Saturday as part of the forced move.
It was the latest troubling sign that the Taliban are restricting women’s rights as they settle into government, just a month since they overran the capital of Kabul. During their previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban had denied girls and women the right to education and barred them from public life.
In Kabul, a new sign was up outside the women’s affairs ministry, announcing it was now the “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”
Staff of the World Bank’s $100 million Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program, which was run out of the Women’s Affairs Ministry, were escorted off the grounds, said program member Sharif Akhtar, who was among those being removed.
On Friday, the Talibanrun education ministry asked boys from grades six to 12 back to school, starting on Saturday, along with their male teachers. There was no mention of girls in those grades returning to school.
Russian elections: The head of Russia’s Communist Party, the country’s second-largest political party, is alleging widespread violations in the election for a new national parliament in which his party is widely expected to gain seats.
Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov said Saturday — the second of three days of voting in the election — that police
and the national elections commission must respond to reports of “a number of absolutely egregious facts” including ballot-stuffing in several regions.
The Golos electionmonitoring movement and independent media also reported violations including vote-buying and lax measures for guarding ballots at polling stations.
Central Elections Commission head Ella Pamfilova said later Saturday that more than 6,200 ballots have been annulled in five regions for procedural violations and ballot-stuffing.
The United Russia party, which is diligently loyal to President Vladimir Putin, appears certain to retain its dominance in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Still, some projections suggest the party could lose its current two-thirds majority, which is enough to change the constitution.
California wildfires endanger ancient sequoias: Crews
were watching the weather this weekend as they battled California wildfires that have burned into some groves of ancient sequoias as they try to protect the world’s largest tree.
The National Weather Service issued a weather watch for critical fire conditions in the Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada, where two lightning-caused fires merged Friday after making its largest growth in a week. The fire reached the western tip of the Giant Forest, where it burned four sequoias known as the “Four Guardsmen” that flank the road into the grove of 2,000 sequoias.
The extent of the fire’s damage on the trees has not been determined.
Firefighters have wrapped the base of the General Sherman Tree, along with other trees in the Giant Forest, in fire-resistant aluminum of the type used in wildland firefighter emergency shelters and to protect historic wooden buildings,
fire spokeswoman Katy Hooper said.
The General Sherman Tree is the largest in the world by volume, at 52,508 cubic feet, according to the National Park Service. It towers 275 feet high and has a circumference of 103 feet at ground level
Yemen rebels execute 9:
Yemen’s Houthi rebels executed on Saturday nine people they said were involved in the killing of a senior rebel official in an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition more than three years ago.
The execution took place by firing squad and was held in public, early in the morning in the rebel-held capital of Sanaa.
The executions took place despite repeated calls by rights groups and lawyers to stop the killings and retry the suspects.
They said the trial, held in a rebel-controlled court where the nine were convicted, was flawed.