Hurricane Ida makes landfall in Louisiana, slamming region
Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana on Sunday with monster Category 4 winds so powerful they reversed the course of the Mississippi River just outside of New Orleans.
The colossal hurricane turned into one of the most powerful storms in US history within 24 hours over the weekend — and struck exactly 16 years to the day of deadly Hurricane Katrina.
Ida stormed ashore around the barrier island of Grand Isle, making official landfall in the offshore-oil town of Port Fourchon around 11:55 a.m. local time, about 40 miles west of where Category 3 Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, the National Hurricane Center said.
“Quite frankly, if you had to draw up the worst possible path for a hurricane in Louisiana, it would be something very, very close to what we’re seeing,” Gov. John Bel Edwards told The Associated Press on Sunday.
“The storm surge is just tremendous. We can see the roofs have been blown off of the port buildings in many places,” he said.
At the time of Sunday’s landfall, Ida had maximum sustained winds of about 150 mph. A storm is considered Category 5, the most powerful, at 157 mph.
Its winds were so ferocious that officials detected a “negative flow’’ to the Mississippi River in one part of the state, according to a US Army Corps of Engineers official.
A supervisor with the US Geological Survey told CNN that the “extremely uncommon’’ flow reversal was seen in Belle Chasse, a community about 20 miles south of New Orleans.
The storm tied for the fifth strongest hurricane to come ashore in the country based on wind speed.
Katrina left at least 1,833 dead and millions homeless along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — and experts warned Ida was an even more fierce weather phenomenon.
The National Weather Service said Sunday that a “life-threatening storm surge” had already impacted most of the state’s coastline, with the seawater predicted to rise as high as 15 feet in Port Fourchon.
Ida was set to travel across the southeast Louisiana wetlands and then pummel New Orleans and Baton Rouge starting late Sunday. Forecasters predicted that it would wind down to a Category 1 or 2 storm as it moved inland to Baton Rouge.
Hurricane Ida had nearly doubled in strength in just 24 hours over the weekend, jumping from a 85 mph storm to a 150 mph storm, which meteorologists called “explosive intensification.”
The storm had grown in strength so quickly before making landfall that New Orleans officials said that there was no time to order a mandatory evacuation of its 390,000 residents.
Those who stayed behind were told to prepare for long power outages amid the sweltering heat.
About 300,000 customers in the state were already experiencing power outages as of Sunday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.US.
Edwards warned that the storm “is going to be a very serious test for our levee systems.
“And it comes at a time that, quite frankly, it presents some very challenging difficulties for us with the hospitals being so full of COVID patients,” Edwards added on CNN.
Edwards said he expected generators to keep the state’s hospitals running through the storm but feared that the Ida’s path of destruction would impact staffing already strained by its influx of COVID-19 patients.
“Quite frankly we’re concerned, as we have been for a long time about staffing, but you know, the storms have an impact on staffing, too, in terms of, do they have to evacuate with their family for some reason? Does their home remain habitable so that they can live at home and go to work?” Edwards said at a press briefing Sunday.
“And so we’ve got an awful lot of work to do, but we will have no higher priority than to make sure that our hospitals can remain in operation and functional.”
Video footage captured part of the roof atop the Lady of the Sea General Hospital in Galliano, La., blowing off amid the storm.
Edwards said the entirety of the state National Guard, more than 4,900 guardsmen, had been activated.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency also had recruited out-of-state crews, including a special emergency-response team from New York City, to help deal with the devastation.
The Big Apple team includes members of the NYPD, FDNY and EMS, as well as six specially trained rescue dogs — and some of the crew responded to the aftermath of Katrina 16 years ago, too, said John Scrivani, commissioner of New York City’s Emergency Management Department, at a briefing in Brooklyn on Sunday.
FDNY Battalion Chief Joe Downey added at the press conference, “Right now,we are scheduled to go down to Baton Rouge … but that can change depending on where the storm hits and when it hits the hardest.”
Before the storm arrived in New Orleans, dangerous winds had already forced emergency medical services to suspend operations Sunday, NOLA.com reported.
In Harvey, La., a massive tree became uprooted by powerful gusts, before falling on a neighbor’s home, video posted to Twitter shows.
Footage captured strong winds rip the roof off a building in Houma, La., and send it tumbling down the street, taking out a power line in the process.
A stretch of Highway 90 that runs along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast was completely underwater, according to video shared on Twitter.
Neighboring states were already feeling effects from Ida, too.
Parts of Gulfport in Mississippi were underwater Sunday.
President Biden on Sunday said the federal government is ready to help impacted regions recover from the storm.
“We’re praying for the best and preparing for the worst,” Biden said.
Additional reporting by Steven Vago and Post Wires
