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‘Do Not Return Here,’ Louisiana’s Governor Tells Evacuees

With electricity still out for hundreds of thousands of customers and a punishing heat settling over southern Louisiana, officials warned on Tuesday that recovery from Hurricane Ida could take days or even weeks, and search-and-rescue efforts continued for those still stranded in the storm’s aftermath.

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Officials in Louisiana Survey Wreckage Left by Hurricane Ida
By
J. David Goodman
and
Sophie Kasakove, New York Times

With electricity still out for hundreds of thousands of customers and a punishing heat settling over southern Louisiana, officials warned on Tuesday that recovery from Hurricane Ida could take days or even weeks, and search-and-rescue efforts continued for those still stranded in the storm’s aftermath.

Gov. John Bel Edwards put the situation in stark terms and offered no timeline for when the state would be able to welcome back residents who had fled the storm.

“Many of the life-supporting infrastructure elements are not present, they’re not operating right now,” Edwards said in a news conference in LaPlace, Louisiana, on Tuesday. “So if you have already evacuated, do not return here or elsewhere in southeast Louisiana until the office of emergency preparedness tells you it’s ready to receive you.”

The situation in the aftermath of the storm has grown dire enough for those who remained in New Orleans that city officials have not ruled out a post-storm evacuation of the city.

But for the moment, their efforts on Tuesday were focused on getting resources to residents, including tarpaulins, food, water and ice. Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the city was dealing with issues “step by step, one day at a time.”

“We know it’s hot, we know we don’t have any power,” the mayor said during a news conference Tuesday, adding that the power company, Entergy, had yet to give a timeline for restoring electricity to the city.

“We are not even there yet to tell you what day” the lights would come back on, the mayor said.

More than 1 million utility customers remained without power on Tuesday, including much of New Orleans, where all eight transmission lines that ordinarily deliver power to the city were knocked out of service. In Mississippi, about 60,000 customers lacked electricity, according to reports compiled by PowerOutage.us.

Inability to run air-conditioning threatened to become a dangerous problem for vulnerable residents of the region, as heat and humidity made the air in much of southern Louisiana and Mississippi feel hotter than 100 degrees on Tuesday.

Like the governor, local officials warned residents who left ahead of the storm to stay away for now. Basic services like emergency response, and everyday amenities of modern life like water, sewage and passable roadways, could not be guaranteed in many places, they said.

Residents who stayed behind surveyed the damage and expressed a lingering feeling of having been hit by something far stronger than they had expected.

“Katrina was a picnic for us, compared to what this one was,” said Ronald Dufrene, 63, who rode out the storm in his 103-foot-long steel shrimp boat on the bayou near his home in Jean Lafitte, Louisiana.

Many houses around his suffered roof damage, and some that were supported on low cement pilings had “drifted off,” he said, and were now awkwardly perched in a neighbor’s yard. “It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” Dufrene said.

At least five deaths have been attributed to the storm, officials said. In Louisiana, a man was killed while driving in New Orleans; a woman was found dead in Jean Lafitte, south of the city; and a man was killed in Prairieville, about 20 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, where a tree fell on a house. In Mississippi, two people were killed and 10 were injured when a highway collapsed.

Ida, now a tropical depression, produced strong rains across the Middle Tennessee Valley on Tuesday as it moved northeastward, and meteorologists issued a flash flood watch for the area, which was still reeling from severe flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred. The storm and its threat of flooding were expected to reach the Mid-Atlantic states on Wednesday, with the potential for 3 to 6 inches of rain there, the National Hurricane Center said.

Entergy, a major power company in Louisiana, said in a statement Tuesday that customers in “the hardest-hit areas could experience power outages for weeks,” and some local officials warned that they could last as long as a month.

The governor expressed frustration with the prospect of lengthy outages. “I’m not satisfied with 30 days, the Entergy people aren’t satisfied with 30 days, nobody who’s out there needing power is satisfied with that,” Edwards said. “But I am mindful that we just had the strongest hurricane — at least tied for the strongest — that the state has ever experienced, and infrastructure has been damaged.”

Edwards added that the power issues could become major problems for hospitals, which have been dealing with a surge of COVID-19 patients and have been relying on generators since Sunday. Several had to be evacuated on Monday.

“I’m worried about it, because that’s how we run our hospitals, too, and our hospitals are full,” he said.

Officials expressed satisfaction that the levee system around New Orleans, upgraded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to better protect the city from flooding, had done its job.

But two days after the storm, the relief that residents might have felt at having dodged one devastating possibility dissipated in the sweltering heat and the dispiriting search for an open store to buy basics.

“I don’t know what we are going to do,” said Gerardo Caal, 41. “There’s no food. And we don’t have electricity to cook.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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