Hurricane “Ida” wreaked havoc in southern Louisiana. Hundreds of thousands have no electricity – and that in the middle of the local summer heat. Numerous people have to be evacuated.
New Orleans – After the strong hurricane “Ida”, hundreds of thousands of households in Louisiana are still without electricity – and with no hope of recovery anytime soon.
“I can’t tell you when the power will be restored, I can’t tell you when all the debris will be cleared,” said US state governor John Bel Edwards. “That was a catastrophic storm,” he said. In the city of New Orleans, the power supply continued to fail completely.
Problems with water supply
Edwards and the Mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, urged anyone who got elsewhere to secure themselves in time for the storm not to return home until further notice. There are problems with the water supply in many places, there is no electricity, hardly any open shops and too many streets are still flooded or full of rubble. “This is not the time to go back,” said Edwards. People should wait for local authorities to explicitly welcome a return.
Videos of the coastguard’s first flights over coastal areas showed a picture of the devastation – many houses appeared to be badly damaged, towns were like a field of rubble. In most places, citizens had been asked to go to safety inland before the storm. Nevertheless, dozens of people in coastal areas were rescued from flooded or destroyed houses by helicopter or boat on Monday, Edwards said. Around 40 residents on the island of Grand Isle, which was hit directly by the hurricane, could also be brought to safety with helicopters.
Two confirmed fatalities
Initially, there were two confirmed fatalities as a result of the storm. A man was killed by a falling tree, another tried to drive his car on a flooded street and drowned, the authorities said. In view of the widespread damage, there is no “miracle” fear that the number of victims will rise in the coming days, Edwards warned. Around 5000 soldiers of the National Guard were on duty for the clean-up and rescue work. In the coming days, they should get reinforcements from other states, Edwards said.
The head of the disaster control agency Fema, Deanne Criswell, and home security minister Alejandro Mayorkas wanted to get an idea of the situation together with the local governor on Tuesday.
Dams held up
“Ida” hit the coast southwest of New Orleans on Sunday as a force four out of five hurricane. “Ida” had reached New Orleans on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane “Katrina”. That storm caused devastating damage and floods in 2005, killing around 1,800 people. Then billions were invested in flood protection. Edwards and Mayor Cantrell said the system had now passed its acid test by “Ida”. If dams were broken, disaster would have been inevitable, Edwards said.
It looked different with the power supply. The White House warned that restoring supplies completely could take “weeks”. The damage reported by the electricity suppliers was “catastrophic,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki. Edwards said the US military will bring additional generators to hospitals.
Damaged high voltage line
The electricity supplier and the state have already mobilized around 20,000 workers and experts to repair the damage. In Louisiana, a good million households ran out of electricity due to storm damage – and that was during the summer heat of all times, when most residents depend on their electrical air conditioning systems.
All eight high-voltage lines that lead to New Orleans were damaged or destroyed by “Ida”. Entergy’s head, Phillip May, said a massive high-voltage line across the Mississippi River, which had once resisted even “Katrina”, was badly damaged and no longer functional.
Storm “Ida”, which has now weakened to a tropical depression, was supposed to move on in a northeasterly direction to Mississippi on Monday, and then on Tuesday towards Alabama and Tennessee. dpa
