Communities in the southern U.S. states of Louisiana and Mississippi are cleaning up and assessing the damage as the remnants of what was Hurricane Ida move out of the region.
The storm came ashore Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane, one of the most powerful ever to hit the mainland United States. Officials say the storm is responsible for the deaths of four people.
The Mississippi State Patrol says two people died late Monday after they were involved in a seven-vehicle accident where a portion of highway collapsed in the southern part of the state, opening a hole in the road.
Police officials say they believe hours of torrential rain contributed to the collapse and prevented motorists from seeing the opening in the highway.
Meanwhile, the sheriff’s department in Slidell, Louisiana says a man is missing after his wife reported he had been attacked by an alligator Monday. The woman told officials her husband was attacked on their flooded property. When she saw he was severely injured, she went for help in a small boat. He was gone when she returned.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said he expects the death toll to rise significantly as the destruction caused by the hurricane made some communities impossible to reach.
Meanwhile, more than one million people remain without power in Louisiana, including in the city of New Orleans, and in Mississippi. Utility company Entergy said all eight electric transmission lines that feed New Orleans are out of service, with one tower falling into the Mississippi River.
Authorities said it could be days, even weeks, before power is fully restored, raising further concerns over residents falling ill from the area’s searing late-summer heat, which forecasters say could go as high as 32 degrees Celsius this week.
Many residents are comparing Ida to Katrina – the infamous hurricane that hit the same day 16 years earlier. New Orleans fared much better this time, thanks to a new $14.5 billion system of levees erected around the city that withstood the onslaught of Ida and kept the waters of the Mississippi River from flooding the city again.
With Katrina, in 2005, the levees failed and left the city underwater, killing 1,800 people and trapping thousands of other residents for days.
But other areas outside New Orleans did far worse. The town of LaPlace, about 55 kilometers west of New Orleans, saw its streets flooded, trapping many residents in their homes. A group of volunteers searched in motorboats in LaPlace and other small towns to rescue trapped residents.
The U.S. National Weather Service says what’s left of Ida is not done causing problems. Forecasters say the storm system is expected to bring very heavy rain to parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions over the next 36 hours. Pennsylvania, in particular, could see serious flooding.
Some information in this report was reported was provided by the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
