NEW ORLEANS: A minimum of one person died and power was out across the US states of Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday as officials warned residents against venturing out on roads suffering from downed power lines and debris from Ida, which remained a strong storm.
“Virtually nobody within the state has electricity and lots of water systems also are out,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said.
Emergency 911 service was also not available in New Orleans within the wake of the powerful Category 4 hurricane that slammed into the state each day earlier.
The price was likely to extend , Edwards told MSNBC, and he posted on Twitter that the state had deployed 1,600 search-and-rescue personnel.
“Please remain sheltered in situ . Although you’ll be tempted to travel explore, conditions are still very dangerous,” the town of latest Orleans Emergency Medical Services wrote on Twitter.
President Joe Biden declared a serious disaster within the state, ordering federal assistance to bolster recovery efforts.
Ida crashed ashore as Louisiana was already reeling from a resurgence of Covid-19 infections that has strained the state’s healthcare system, with an estimated 2,450 Covid-19 patients hospitalised statewide, many in medical care units. The storm’s arrival came 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, one among the foremost catastrophic and deadly US storms on record, struck the Gulf Coast , and a few year after the last Category 4 hurricane, Laura, battered Louisiana.
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator Deanne Criswell said the complete impact of the storm would become clear later within the day.
“We’re hearing about widespread structural damage,” Criswell said in an interview with CNN. “I don’t think there could are a worse path for this storm. It’s getting to have some significant impacts.” The Karnofsky Shop, the primary jazz record store in New Orleans , was a heap of bricks after the storm with the roofs from other damaged buildings littering the town streets.
Federal levees seemed to have held. many miles of latest levees were built around New Orleans after flooding from Katrina inundated much of the low-lying city, especially historically Black neighborhoods.
Ida lost a number of its punch because it grinded over southwestern Mississippi on Monday, but the system, downgraded to a tropical storm, could still trigger heavy flooding throughout the region, the National Hurricane Center said.
A loss of generator power at the Thibodaux Regional Health System hospital in Lafourche Parish, southwest of latest Orleans, forced medical workers to manually assist respirator patients with breathing while they were moved to a different floor, the state Health Department confirmed on Sunday.
Power was knocked out Sunday night to the whole New Orleans metropolitan area following the failure of all eight transmission lines that deliver electricity to the town , the utility company Entergy Louisiana reported.
One transmission tower collapsed into the Mississippi , the Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Department said.
Just over 1 million Louisiana homes and businesses were without electricity on Monday, also as nearly 130,000 in Mississippi, consistent with the tracking site PowerOutage.
Ida pummeled US Gulf Coast energy suppliers, knocking out most of the region’s offshore wells and nearly half its motor fuel production and drove prices broadly higher.
