Ida Leaves Widespread Devastation, 1 Million Without Power

Ida has been downgraded to a tropical storm but is still packing a punch as flooding, storm surge and powerful winds remain a concern for parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Hurricane Ida will go down as one of the worst storms in Louisiana history as it hit Sunday as a Category 4. Accuweather reports:

A local storm report issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) office in New Orleans has demonstrated just how powerful Hurricane Ida was after making landfall in Louisiana. Instrumentation onboard a ship docked in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, recorded maximum sustained winds of 149 mph and a wind gust of 172 mph shortly after noon, local time, Sunday. 

Ida ripped roofs off of buildings and caused some to collapse. Weather.com writes:

Hurricane Ida’s catastrophic crawl across Louisiana inundated miles of roadways and neighborhoods, ripped apart buildings and trapped hundreds of residents who can’t call 911 because service has been knocked out, and cannot be rescued because conditions are still too treacherous to reach them.”

Tim Kerner, the Mayor of the town of Jean Lafitte, which lies outside the Jefferson Parish levee protection system, spoke with WGNO-TV:

We have a small group trying to take out the people in the most imminent danger. This is a very dangerous situation. I’ve never seen so much water in my life. We’ve lost our school and everything, but now with people’s lives, it has turned into a total rescue mission…People’s lives are I believe at stake now. We are trying to get them out as soon as fast as we can and as soon as this weather [breaks] we are going to send an army to them.”

Catastrophic damage is also being reported in Lafourche Parish, where every road is reportedly impassable (watch above from WWL-TV).

More than 1 million homes and businesses are without power, that includes the entire city of New Orleans. There is no word on when it will be restored. Entergy power company said they suffered “catastrophic transmission damage.”

There has been one confirmed death attributed to Ida, but due to the blackout and outages with AT&T, it’s hard to know how many people are injured or trapped. There has been no contact whatsoever with people stuck on Grand Isle, Louisiana since yesterday morning. The highway to the island is washed out.

Ida is also expected to have an impact on the Tennessee and Ohio valleys as well as the Mid-Atlantic as it moves northeast. Flooding is a major concern, especially after Tennessee’s recent storms.