The people of Louisiana may be in the dark for weeks as officials take stock of the damage from Hurricane Ida.
Hurricane Ida has been downgraded to a tropical depression after it hit the Louisiana coast Sunday as a Category 4 storm on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Now about one million locals remain without power.
On Monday, Ida continued to bring torrential rain and flooding to Louisiana and southern Mississippi, where two people died when a flooded highway collapsed.
“It’s going to be a difficult life for quite some time,” said one local leader in the Greater New Orleans area.
About 5,000 National Guard members have been deployed to aid search and rescue. Louisiana’s main utility company Entergy says it could be weeks before it restores electricity to nearly a million people in the storm’s path, including all of New Orleans, as temperatures rise to near 90 degrees.
Ida was previously deemed “life-threatening”, drawing comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, a 2005 storm that had a path similar to Ida and killed 1,800 people.
