Hurricane Ida Slams Louisiana, Causes Widespread Damage And Power Outages

Hurricane Ida battered Louisiana as a category 4 hurricane when it made landfall on Sunday, before weakening to a category 3 hurricane later on in the evening.

The massive hurricane caused widespread power outages and led to large numbers of people fleeing the area for shelter while others stayed in place and braced for impact.“Ida’s eye came ashore late Sunday morning near Port Fourchon, La., with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles an hour, just shy of the 157 m.p.h. winds of a Category 5 storm,” The New York Times reported. “Storm waters are expected to strain the levees and pumps and other hurricane defenses that were reinforced around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.”

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said during a press conference on Sunday evening that there was “no doubt that the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely difficult for our state and many, many people are going to be tested in ways that we can only imagine.”

The hurricane hit as the state has had to deal with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation over the last several weeks.Edwards said in a major disastrous declaration that the hurricane was “one of the strongest storms to ever hit Louisiana.”

“More than 814,000 homes and businesses were without power in Louisiana as of about 7 p.m. CDT,” The Weather Channel reported. “Entergy, the state’s largest utility provider, said that number included every customer in New Orleans. The outages reflect only individual accounts – not the number of people actually in the dark.”

Weather from the hurricane was so severe the U.S. Coast Guard could not deploy to the area to assist with rescue operations.

“Unfortunately, the weather right now is preventing us from responding down into the impact area,” Vice Admiral Steven Poulin, the Commander of Coast Guard Atlantic Area, told Fox News. “It’s beyond our weather parameters but we’ll respond to any distress needs of assistance as soon as we can.”

The storm will be the biggest test that the state’s upgraded levee system has faced since 2005 when Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana 16 years ago to the day, devastated the area.

Scenes from the area included: