New Orleans goes dark as Hurricane Ida unleashes its fury

NEW ORLEANS • Hurricane Ida pummelled New Orleans and the Louisiana coast with lashing rain and ferocious gusts, leaving much of the US region without electricity and bracing itself for widespread floods and devastation.

The storm, wielding some of the most powerful winds ever to hit the state, drove a wall of water inland when it thundered ashore on Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane.

All of New Orleans was without power when evening fell.

As Ida lumbers north, it is expected to unleash a potentially catastrophic amount of rain, totalling up to 60cm.

"We're in for some historic floods," said Mr Jim Rouiller, lead meteorologist at the Energy Weather Group. "The rainfall - that is going to be the next story."

Ida struck New Orleans on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the costliest tropical cyclone in US history that left much of the city in ruins.

Now the levees, pumps and other infrastructure rebuilt after that 2005 storm are being put to their biggest test yet.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Nora, which has weakened to a tropical storm, killed one boy over the weekend after torrential rain and heavy winds caused a building in the resort town Puerto Vallarta in Mexico to partially collapse.

Nora was about 165km north-west of Mazatlan on Sunday evening and moving north-north west at 19kmh, the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said.

The Miami-based NHC expected Nora to continue moving north-northwest in its latest advisory and then move slower northwest through to today.

In the south-eastern part of the US hit by hurricane Ida, Louisiana's hospitals are already overwhelmed with more than 2,600 coronavirus patients.

President Joe Biden has approved a federal disaster declaration for Louisiana to assist with its recovery.

Signs have already emerged that Ida's toll has been dire. The storm was responsible for at least one death, as the Louisiana health department said a man was killed when a tree fell on his home.

More than one million homes and businesses in Louisiana and about 67,000 in Mississippi were without power, according to Poweroutage.us, which tracks utility outages.

The utility that serves New Orleans, Entergy Corp, said some could be in the dark for weeks. The company's transmission system suffered "catastrophic damage", it said in a statement.

Ida drove so much water off the Gulf of Mexico that the Mississippi River flowed backwards.

In downtown New Orleans, the river has already risen by 2.1m in the last 24 hours, according to the National Weather Service.

Ida made landfall amid the final stretch of what has been a summer of extreme weather in the United States and around the globe.

Six tropical cyclones have now struck the US, and the temperature in Portland, Oregon, hit an unthinkable 46.7 deg C in June.

Floods killed 20 people earlier this month in Tennessee, while wildfires fuelled by heatwaves and drought blackened huge swathes of California, as well as countries like Greece, Algeria and Siberia, sending smoke over the North Pole for the first time on record.

Ida's 240kmh winds tie Louisiana's hurricane record set by Laura last year and a 19th-century storm.

Although Katrina made landfall with 202kmh winds, that does not necessarily mean it was weaker. At its peak over the Gulf, Katrina's winds reached about 282kmh, making it a Category 5 system with a monstrous storm surge. And while Ida is big, Katrina was bigger - with hurricane-force winds.

After swirling past New Orleans, Ida is projected to cut across Mississippi and work its way north-east, rolling over New Jersey and New York later this week before blowing back out to sea.

Aside from the swelling Mississippi, several smaller rivers in eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi are expected to rise more than 3m in the next few days, according to the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Centre.

The storm could damage close to one million homes along the coast, according to CoreLogic.

It also ran directly over chemical plants, refineries and the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port.

All told, damage and losses could exceed US$40 billion (S$53.8 billion), said Mr Chuck Watson, a disaster modeller at Enki Research. That would make it among the costliest ever in the US.

Oil explorers preparing for the storm have already halted the equivalent of more than 1.74 million barrels of daily crude production.

BLOOMBERG