Hurricane Ida power outages, misery persist nine days later
NEW ORLEANS — Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, most of them outside New Orleans, still didn’t have power Tuesday and more than half of the gas stations in two major cities were without fuel nine days after Hurricane Ida slammed into the state.
There were also persistent signs of recovery, however, as the total number of people without electricity has fallen from more than a million at its peak, while hundreds of thousands of people have had their water restored. AT&T, which suffered widespread cellphone outages after the storm, reported that its wireless network now is operating normally in Louisiana.
As residents struggled to recover, state organizations, church groups and volunteers labored for a ninth day to hand out food, water and other supplies to those left without resources when their homes were destroyed or left uninhabitable.
Warner Thomas, president and CEO of the state’s largest hospital system — Ochsner Health — warned that it would be “some time” before hospitals in Terrebonne and Lafourche parish fully reopen. Emergency rooms at the two hospitals, however, were open.
Kim Bass said the Louisiana heat was the hardest thing to cope with without power at her home in St. John the Baptist Parish. She said she and her husband were using a generator to keep food refrigerated but had no air conditioning. Water service was intermittent.
“So you may have water one minute, then you may not have water for the next two days,” she said.
Fuel shortages also persisted across hard-hit areas of the state. More than 50 percent of gas stations in New Orleans and Baton Rouge remained without gasoline Tuesday morning, according to GasBuddy.com.
The power situation has improved greatly since Ida first hit. In the first hours after the storm, nearly 1.1 million customers were in the dark — including all of New Orleans. With the help of workers from power companies in numerous states, the state’s biggest energy provider, Entergy, has been able to slowly bring electricity back, leaving only 19 percent of its customers in the region without power as of Tuesday.
Ida’s death toll in Louisiana rose to 15 people Tuesday. The storm’s remnants also brought historic flooding, record rains and tornados from Virginia to Massachusetts, killing at least 50 more people.
Seven nursing home residents in Louisiana died after being evacuated during Hurricane Ida to a warehouse in the town of Independence where conditions were later determined to be unhealthy and unsafe, according to state health officials who said they’ve launched an investigation into the facility.