Hurricane Ida battered Louisiana on Sunday with an onslaught of harsh winds and floodwaters, leaving nearly a million people without power including much of New Orleans and at least one person dead, Washington Post reported.
The hurricane made landfall as a powerful Category 4 storm, which weakened to a Category 2 storm on Sunday night with maximum winds of 105 miles per hour. It sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling to evacuate, and left countless others bracing for survival, in an eerie echo of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana 16 years ago to the day.
Ida’s eye came ashore late Sunday morning near Port Fourchon, La., with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles an hour, just shy of the 157 m.p.h. winds of a Category 5 storm. Hurricane-force winds extended up to 50 miles from the storm’s center, which was moving northwestward in the afternoon across a region of bayous, lakes, and wetlands, menacing Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
The storm’s trajectory and strength present a high-stakes dual threat to the region. Storm waters are expected to strain the levees and pumps and other hurricane defenses that were reinforced around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, hospital systems are already under strain as Louisiana grapples with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation.
Hurricane Ida has left catastrophic damage across southeastern Louisiana, killing at least one person, leaving much of the New Orleans area without power, interrupting phone service, and sending rescuers scrambling Monday to flooded homes where people were anxiously asking for help, CNN reported.
Ida, now a slow-moving tropical storm over western Mississippi, threatens to cause more flooding not just in the Deep South but also into the Tennessee and Ohio valleys as it crawls north over the next few days.
Rescuers were getting numerous reports of people who climbed into attics or onto roofs as waters rose in their homes, especially in parishes just outside New Orleans.
About 15 people were helped off roofs and into boats early Monday in the city of Slidell alone, and rescuers in high-water vehicles still were taking people to safety on the lower side of town in the late morning, Mayor Greg Cromer said.
Because cell phone service was sporadic in much of the region, rescuers sometimes were having to find for themselves who needed help.
HJ/PR
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