Powerful Hurricane Ida, now weakened to a tropical storm, left all of New Orleans and more than a million people in the state of Louisiana without power as it moved along the Gulf of Mexico coast, flooding coastal cities before reaching Mississippi.
The phenomenon left at least one death and "catastrophic" damage in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area, the capital and second most populous city in Louisiana, and President Joe Biden approved the state's request for a federal major disaster declaration.
Jefferson Parish, west and south of New Orleans, issued an advisory via Twitter on Sunday for its eastern residents to boil water "due to loss of pressure in the distribution system."
The phenomenon advanced this morning with maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour (95 kilometers per hour), more than 12 hours after making landfall in southern Louisiana.
Experts predict that it will weaken rapidly in the morning.
[Despite the fragility of their houses in the face of Hurricane Ida, these Hispanics in decided not to evacuate]
Authorities have called on Alliance residents, about 20 miles southeast of New Orleans, to evacuate after a levee failed.
The Plaquemines parish government urged people to evacuate the area immediately in a Facebook post Sunday night and were offered to tell a local audience if they needed shelter.
Around the same time, the National Weather Service issued an emergency flash flood warning for the area "due to a levee failure."
The blackout in New Orleans, meanwhile, increased the city's vulnerability to flooding and left thousands of people without air conditioning or refrigerators amid the scorching summer heat.
The storm made landfall on Sunday noon, the same day of the year as Hurricane Katrina, which swept through Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years ago.
Its 150-mile-per-hour (230-kilometer-per-hour) winds equaled the mark for the fifth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the continental United States.
On August 29, the protection levee system that protects the city failed and the city suffered major floods in which more than 1,800 people died.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards warned that rescue teams could not immediately help everyone affected.
And he warned his state to prepare for a recovery process that could take weeks.
"Many people are going to be tested in ways that we can only imagine today," he told a news conference Sunday.
However, he added: "There is always light after dark, and I assure you we will get through this."
The governor added it was "one of the strongest storms to make landfall here in modern times."
Hurricane Ida causes the first death in New Orleans and causes several damages
Aug. 30, 202102: 19
Ida's passage through Louisiana "possibly" caused the death of one person. Ascension Parish police officers responded to a report of a man injured by a fallen tree at a Prairieville home outside Baton Rouge and confirmed the death, police said Sunday on Facebook. The victim was not identified.
Ascension Parish is part of the Baton Rouge metropolitan area, a region that is expected to receive the worst of Hurricane Ida until early Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
[How to prepare for a hurricane?]
The New Orleans emergency
preparedness
agency NOLA Ready indicated that the only electricity currently available in the entire metropolitan area comes exclusively from generators. Mississippi has almost 100,000 power outages, according to the specialized website Poweroutage.us.
The outages are presumably due to system failures such as the one in New Orleans or the failure of numerous utility poles. As the hours pass, it is feared that this number may increase as Ida continues its northward course towards the interior of the region.
Although its winds have lost strength, the greatest danger remains the water, both from the storm surge and from the heavy rains, especially now that it is
your travel speed has slowed down to 8 miles per hour
(13 kilometers per hour).
This causes the rains to fall on the same area for a longer time, which increases the chances of water accumulation.
[Dos and don'ts during and after a hurricane]
The NHC warned in its latest bulletin that a "catastrophic storm surge, hurricane force winds and flash floods continue in portions of southeastern Louisiana" due to the passage of Ida.
Ida is the third hurricane to hit this state in the last year.
Hurricane Laura hit the state with category four on August 27, 2020, while Hurricane Zeta made landfall there on October 28, 2020 with category three.