Hurricane Ida Leaves a Million People Without Power, Total Damage Still Unknown

Hurricane Ida left around one million Louisiana residents without power as it ripped through Orleans Parish, home to New Orleans. At its peak on Sunday, it was classified as a Category 4 hurricane, prompting mandatory and voluntary evacuations for thousands of Louisianans. At least one person has died in the hurricane’s wake.

People in the hardest-hit areas could experience power outages for weeks, power company Entergy said Monday.

Those who stayed (many of whom could not leave) faced indoor flooding, ripped-out tree roots, broken windows, flying roofs, and more catastrophic consequences of the hurricane, estimated to be stronger (albeit smaller in area) than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Gov. John Bel Edwards warned that Ida could be the strongest to hit Louisiana since the 1850s, in a press conference Saturday.

“This is going to be much stronger than we usually see and, 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,” Bel Edwards told the Associated Press. 

Ida has since slowed substantially and is now classified as a Category 1 (with maximum winds of 95 miles-per-hour) and rescue teams are emerging to survey its damage. Bel Edwards told MSNBC Monday that he anticipates the death tolls to “go up considerably throughout the day” as these efforts continue.

State officials don’t yet know the extent of the damage Ida has caused, including to the local energy grid. At least eight transmission lines failed under the hurricane’s winds, including a major electrical tower that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Saturday, causing outages that rippled across New Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, St. Charles, and Terrebonne parishes as a result of a grid-load imbalance.

“It will likely take days to determine the extent of damage to our power grid and far longer to restore electrical transmission to the region,” Entergy Energy, Louisiana’s largest utility, tweeted Monday morning. 

“Tomorrow we’ll know more. Hopefully we’ll build on that, once we have boots on the ground," Deanna Rodriguez, president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, told NOLA.com around 1 a.m. on Monday. 

The state has long faced the brunt of annual hurricane season and power outages—which can be deadly for those who rely on electricity to power medical devices, air conditioning, and refrigerators—often come with that. Ida’s vicious predecessor, Hurricane Katrina, damaged the entire Entergy grid in 2005, tearing down nearly 30,000 utility poles, shuttering power plants, and leaving 2 million people without power. The utility faced billions of dollars in damage repair, driving it into bankruptcy as it failed to prevent power disruptions for up to a year after the hurricane. It filed and was approved for an 8 percent rate hike in New Orleans in 2007, pushing the cost of grid repair off to consumers. 

In the years since, Entergy has prepared disaster prevention plans to mitigate outages across the state, but many have nonetheless feared that it was still vulnerable to climate catastrophes like this one.

At time of publication, more than one million Louisiana customers remain without power in the southeast region of the state—the majority Entergy customers—according to outage aggregator PowerOutage.US.