Ida pummels Louisiana, putting New Orleans in dark
NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Ida howled into Louisiana on Sunday with powerful winds and dangerously high storm surges, lashing coastal communities, battering New Orleans and putting the city’s system for resisting catastrophic flooding to its biggest test since Hurricane Katrina.
Arriving 16 years to the day since that storm devastated New Orleans, Ida sent residents fleeing east and west out of its path on jammed roadways across Louisiana. Those who remained — by choice or by circumstance of the fast-arriving storm — endured maximum winds that reached 150 mph, just shy of Category 5 intensity.
The storm made landfall shortly before noon, earlier than expected and only days after it became a named hurricane. Its rapid strengthening amazed meteorologists and left officials and Gulf Coast residents with little time to prepare.
“This is one of the strongest storms to make landfall here in modern times,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a briefing Sunday afternoon.
President Joe Biden, speaking at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters Sunday, said that “the devastation is likely to be immense” and promised that “as soon as the storm passes, we’re going to have the country’s full might behind the rescue and recovery.”
Late Sunday, more than 789,000 people, including the entire city of New Orleans, were without power, according to local officials. New Orleans’ Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness said on Twitter that energy company Entergy confirmed that the only power in the city was coming from generators. The message included a screenshot that cited “catastrophic transmission damage” for the power failure.
White-capped waves appeared on the Mississippi River as winds uprooted trees, tore roofs from buildings and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands across the state. Storm surges inundated areas of the coast from Burns Point, west of New Orleans, to around Biloxi, Miss. Floodwaters threatened inland communities such as Baton Rouge, La.
Winds up to 82 mph, with gusts up to 138 mph, spread inland all through the afternoon.
“It’s been an experience, the roughest I’ve ever seen it,” said Anthony Rodrigue, 62, who has never evacuated his home in Houma, La., for a storm. “There’s so many sheets of rain, I can’t even see across the street from my house.”
The National Hurricane Center said that by Monday, the storm will have drenched the Gulf Coast with an estimated 8 to 16 inches of rain — and perhaps as much as 20 inches in some places.
Heavy rainfall and flooding were expected across several states into the week as the hurricane and its remnants moved toward the Northeast.
In a sign of the storm’s strength, water overtopped at least one levee in Plaquemines Parish, southeast of New Orleans, by late afternoon. Officials had expected some water to rise above levees, cautioning that it was not a sign of their failure.
Ida presented a second severe crisis to a state already in the throes of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation.
COVID-19 deaths in Louisiana have climbed to their highest levels of the pandemic. Hospitals, already filled or near capacity by a surge of COVID patients, scrambled Sunday to manage operations during the storm as evacuations were no longer possible. The storm blew portions of the roof off one hospital outside New Orleans, Lady of the Sea General Hospital.
New Orleans suspended its emergency medical services shortly before noon because of high winds, saying in a statement that operations would resume “once it is safe.”
“Nobody should be expecting that tonight a first responder is going to be able to answer a call for help,” Edwards said, underscoring that residents who had not already left needed to stay in their homes.
Officials have expressed confidence that efforts to harden levees and flood systems around New Orleans after Katrina would be enough to hold back storm surges. But, Edwards said, the same might not be the case in other areas of the state, where the infrastructure “is not built to that same standard.”
Even before it arrived, the storm stirred painful reminders in New Orleans of the death and devastation wrought in 2005 by Katrina. The storm killed 1,833 people, inflicted more than $100 billion in damage and submerged large stretches of New Orleans, leading to scenes of suffering that horrified the nation and stunned the world.
The trajectory and strength of Ida presented a high-stakes test of the levees, flood walls, pumps and gates that were reinforced around New Orleans after Katrina.
Ida significantly disrupted the energy infrastructure along the coast, forcing oil and gas companies to shut down over 90 percent of production in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers were evacuated from offshore platforms. The Colonial Pipeline, which delivers transportation fuel from Texas to New York, said Sunday that it had temporarily shut down some of its network.
As night fell, many in New Orleans lit their homes with candles or flashlights.
Samantha Egana was amazed that she still had power at her house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans hours after the storm had arrived. “Nobody else has lights,” Egana, 56, said. “My daughter Uptown, no lights. My other daughter in the East, no lights.”
“This is not Katrina,” she said as she looked outside her window. She deemed the rain and wind bearable, adding that the water was “steady pouring down, but it’s not building up.”
“It’s going to pass,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”
Hours later, the entire city was without power.