New Orleans in darkness as Hurricane Ida strikes
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Hurricane Ida pounded Louisiana in the US after sweeping ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, flooding wide areas under heavy surf and torrential rains as fierce winds toppled trees and power lines, plunging New Orleans into darkness after nightfall.
Ida weakened into a tropical storm over southwestern Mississippi early yesterday, the US National Hurricane Center said, but it is expected to continue unleashing heavy downpours 鈥渓ikely to result in life-threatening鈥 flooding.
On Sunday night, the sheriff鈥檚 office in Ascension Parish reported the first known US fatality from the storm, a 60-year-old man killed by a tree falling on his home near Baton Rouge, the state capital.
Ida, the first major hurricane to strike the United States this year, made landfall around noon on Sunday as a ferocious Category 4 storm over Port Fourchon, a hub of the Gulf鈥檚 offshore oil industry, packing sustained winds of up to 240 kilometers per hour.
Its arrival came 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, one of the most catastrophic and deadly US storms on record, struck the Gulf Coast, and about a year after the last Category 4 hurricane, Laura, battered Louisiana.
President Joe Biden declared a major disaster in the state, ordering federal assistance to bolster recovery efforts in more than two dozen storm-stricken parishes.
Ida crashed ashore as Louisiana was already reeling from a resurgence of COVID-19 infections that has strained the state鈥檚 healthcare system, with an estimated 2,450 COVID-19 patients hospitalized statewide, many in intensive care.
Within 12 hours of landfall, Ida had weakened into a Category 1 hurricane on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, with top winds clocked at 135 kph as the storm pushed about 135km inland past New Orleans, Louisiana鈥檚 largest city.
By then, Ida had plowed a destructive path that submerged much of the state鈥檚 coastline under several feet of surf, with flash flooding reported by the hurricane center across southeastern Louisiana.
Nearly all offshore Gulf oil production was suspended in advance of the storm, and major ports along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts were closed to shipping.
Power was knocked out on Sunday night to the entire New Orleans metropolitan area following the failure of all eight transmission lines that deliver electricity to the city, utility firm Entergy Louisiana said.
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