Louisiana: Tropical storm Ida leaves 1 million people without power

Monday, August 30, 2021

The hurricane forecasters downgraded powerful storm Ida to a tropical storm Monday morning but are still warning of dangerous storm surges, damaging winds and heavy rainfall in multiple states.

This powerful storm weakened 16 hours after Ida made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane. Ida battered Louisiana late into Sunday night and early Monday, with reports of downed power lines, levee failures and flooding, collapsed buildings and trapped residents on rooftops.

Forecasters warned that flooding from storm surges will continue through Monday morning in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

As Ida’s center moves into southwestern Mississippi, damaging winds could cause more power outages. Heavy rainfall is possible through Tuesday morning across southeastern Louisiana, coastal Mississippi and southwestern Alabama.

The flooding could also hit portions of the Tennessee and Ohio valleys and the Mid-Atlantic through Wednesday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Now, more than a million people in Louisiana and Mississippi are without power Monday morning as Ida, leaves a trail of downed power lines in its path.

All of New Orleans and swaths of Houma, Baton Rouge and Hammond suffered from downed power lines, according to Entergy, a utility with 3 million customers across the South, as Ida moves out of Louisiana and into Mississippi.

As of 5:46 a.m., more than 1 million customers in Louisiana were experiencing outages, according to PowerOutage.us. In western Mississippi, more than 102,000 customers were in the dark.

The city operations in New Orleans are running on generators, according to the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. All eight transmission lines that provide power to the city are down, according to Entergy.

Earlier in the day, the company said that, based on past restoration times, customers in the storm’s direct path may experience outages for up to three weeks, although 90 percent of customers are expected to have their power restored sooner.

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