Category 4 “extremely dangerous” Hurricane Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, at 12:55 pm ET with sustained maximum winds of 150 mph.
When the hurricane made landfall, New Orleans officials warned residents that they had been left to “fall.” “There’s no one coming right now,” said Collin Arnold, New Orleans ’top emergency manager.
A brief 911 outage was reported around 11 a.m., but the city’s deputy director of resilience, David Morris, said it had been resolved in ten minutes. But officials stressed that 911 is for emergencies only.
Ida threatened a region that was already suffering from a resurgence of COVID-19 infections, due to low vaccination rates and the highly contagious delta variant.
New Orleans hospitals planned to get out of the storm with beds almost full, as hospitals with similar stress elsewhere had little room for evacuated patients. And shelters for people fleeing their homes carried an additional risk of becoming flash points for new infections.
Hurricane winds began attacking Grand Isle on Sunday morning. Before power was lost on the barrier island of Louisiana, a webcam in front of the beach showed the ocean rising steadily as the waves grew and palm trees whipped.
Meteorologists warned that winds of more than 115 mph were soon forecast in Houma, a city of 33,000 that supports oil rigs in the gulf.
The storm made landfall on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
NOAA / NESDIS / STAR GOES-East