Louisiana residents who evacuated before Ida are urged to stay away

NEW ORLEANS – As hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana faced the prospect of extremely hot weeks without power, authorities urged those who fled before the onslaught of Hurricane Ida to stay away indefinitely as the long work of recovery began.

As search and rescue efforts ended in the bayous and small towns of southern Louisiana, the grim reality of the storm’s aftermath, even in places like New Orleans that had been spared the worst, became woefully clear.

“A lot of the survival infrastructure is not there, it’s not functioning right now,” Governor John Bel Edwards said at a press conference in the flooded town of LaPlace on Tuesday. “If you’ve already evacuated, don’t come back. “

In New Orleans, which has been without power since Sunday night, the situation has become so dire for those who remain that city officials have considered extensive evacuations after the storm. But for now, given that the current crisis is not one of crumbling houses, as was the case in the chaotic days following Hurricane Katrina, city officials are focusing on supplying electricity. food, water and ice for residents who desperately need it.

“We know it’s hot, we know we don’t have electricity,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at a press conference, adding that the power company, Entergy, had no yet given schedule for the restoration of electricity in the city. Food and water distribution points were set up in parks and churches, and city buses served as “mobile cooling centers”.

Still, officials stressed that they had not completely ruled out the possibility of large-scale evacuations for the 200,000 people they say remain in the city.

“We have to look at every eventuality,” said Collin Arnold, director of the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

As the people of New Orleans choked in thick, humid air that seemed hotter than 100 degrees, things were even worse in other areas of southern Louisiana, where damage from wind and wind Sunday water was abysmal. About 700,000 people were without water on Tuesday, including hundreds of thousands in Jefferson Parish, where buses were picking up people who did not have access to transportation and taking them to shelters elsewhere in the state.

“We get calls all day,” said Byron Lee, a Jefferson Parish city councilor.

Tens of thousands more in the state were on boil water advisory. Eleven hospitals have been evacuated as the state suffers one of its worst Covid-19 outbreaks of the pandemic. Some facilities were damaged by the storm; at least one reported a back-up generator malfunction.

“Our hospitals are full,” the governor said at the press conference. “And we know that even if you have a generator, usually after so many days they start to fail. And so we are doing everything we can to work with them to get the power back on as quickly as possible.

Leaving behind a trail of destruction in Louisiana, Ida’s remains continued to move northeast on Tuesday, bringing heavy rains and flash flooding risks to Alabama, Tennessee and eventually into central Atlantic. Back in the state it had landed in, over a million customers were without power, including everyone in New Orleans.

A spokesperson for Entergy, New Orleans’ largest electric utility, said in an email on Tuesday that he expected “to have the first lights in the city by the end of the day on Wednesday. “, but did not provide details. Still, city officials said, given the extent of the damage, it would take some time to get electricity to homes even after power returned.

In a sweaty and miserable city on Tuesday, it was all talk.

“I could barely breathe last night,” said Eddie Garner, 32, who found himself behind a hundred people hoping to buy generators when he arrived at Lowe’s shortly before 9 a.m. . His mother and brother are both hospitalized with Covid-19 – his mother on a ventilator, he said – and he was unable to reach the nursing station by phone. The heat left him dizzy, exhausted and dejected.

“We may have survived the storm, but it’s just too much,” Garner said, his voice shaking. “We can’t do it much longer like this.”

Thanks to $ 14.5 billion in flood protection infrastructure, New Orleans was spared Hurricane Ida. The levees held up, the storm barriers kept the lake out, and the hurricane, while feigning toward the town at the last minute, did not deliver the punitive blows locals have grown to fear.

But avoiding the worst of a disaster doesn’t mean avoiding the disaster. With a power outage throughout the city, schools are closed indefinitely and hospitals are running on a generator. City officials are discussing the possibility of using the convention center as a refuge for people from across the region with specialized medical needs.

On Tuesday morning, Tulane University students were put on buses to Houston, which were asked to return in person in October; At Covenant House, a homeless shelter across the city, 60 people, including three very young children with their mothers and two pregnant women, also traveled to Houston.

Residents of New Orleans who were already in hotel rooms in Houston, thinking they would spend a day or two outside, calculated how long they could afford to stay there. Those who hadn’t left and had nowhere to go wondered how they would fare on some of the hottest days of summer.

On Tuesday evening, the mayor announced a curfew at 8 p.m., standing next to New Orleans Police Chief Shaun Ferguson, who warned that a city without streetlights after dark was “totally dangerous “.

In eastern New Orleans – one of the neighborhoods that suffered the worst flooding after Katrina in 2005 – poor residents and workers at an apartment complex called the Willows were swamped by the heat on Tuesday. None had electricity, and many had no cash or gasoline or working cars or cell phones that still had a charge.

Dianne Delpit, 40, who lived with her extended family in a unit where the roof collapsed and water soaked in their belongings, hoped relatives could come and pick them up in Baton Rouge. But it was difficult to reach anyone and no one had come to see her and her family.

“It’s like we just have to survive on our own,” Ms. Delpit said. “It’s like Katrina.”

Natalie Jayroe, president and CEO of the Second Harvest Food Bank, said food banks in southern Louisiana are generally prepared for the short-term fallout from hurricanes and other disasters. But because of how quickly Ida got through and how long her effects were expected to last, she said, there was “growing nervousness” about the shortages of food and clean water.

Louisiana typically has around 750,000 people in need of food assistance. During the pandemic, that number rose to around 930,000. “On top of that, all those people who are normally food secure but don’t have the power or ability to shop and buy groceries and you talk about a million people in the state. who need help, ”Ms. Jayroe said.

All over New Orleans people seemed to be lining up – generators, gas, meals, bags of ice, some sort of deliverance from misery. At the corner of Joséphine Street, dozens of Spanish-speaking men were waiting under a relentless sun for the possibility of cleaning up. But no van or truck passed.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Gerardo Caal, a 41-year-old Guatemalan wearing a baseball cap. “There is no food. And we don’t have electricity to cook.

A few yards away, traffic to Uptown was hampered by a line of blocks of cars leading to one of the few open gas stations in the area. Malcolm Scott, 60, a former Louisiana State University star player, said he had been waiting hours for gas. He wasn’t trying to leave town, he said, but to move to his girlfriend’s place on the third floor of an apartment building, out of hard-earned fears that the town’s levees would collapse again. .

“There is nowhere to go,” he said as he left town. “People don’t want New Orleans people since Katrina anymore. They think we are the worst of the worst.

A block away, the front door of a Family Dollar store had been smashed, with bottles of hair care products and packets of food strewn among the broken glass. Two employees walked around the debris and recorded it on their phones. “I guess we won’t be back to work for two months,” said one of them, a young woman.

A black sedan pulled up with a family inside. The worker said there were no items to sell.

“No diapers, right?” said a voice from inside the car.

The young worker shrugged his shoulders.

A man got out of the car, looked over his shoulders, and walked through the hole in the door.

Sophie kasakov, Giulia Heyward, and Ivan Penn contributed reports.