Faced with the forecast that much of New Orleans will regain electricity next week, Mayor LaToya Cantrell encouraged residents who left before Hurricane Ida arrived to return to their homes. But outside the city, the forecasts were gloomier, with no exact date for the return of light and with homes and businesses in ruins.
Six days after the Iada Pass, the hardest hit parts of Louisiana were still struggling to regain some hint of normalcy. Even on the outskirts of New Orleans, the continued lack of electricity made the embarrassing end of summer more difficult to bear and aggravated the problems. Louisiana authorities were looking for a man who shot and killed another Friday while waiting in a long line at a gas station in a suburb.
Starting Saturday, the city will offer transportation to any resident who wants to leave the city and go to a public shelter, Cantrell said. In addition, some inmates have already begun to be moved to senior centers.
The picture was unpromising south and west of the city, where Iada hit hardest. Parish police in Lafourche warned residents of the complicated situation that awaits them if they return: there is no electricity or running water, mobile coverage is scarce and there is almost no petrol.
President Joe Biden inspected the damage in some of these areas on Friday and visited a neighborhood in LaPlace, a community between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain that recorded catastrophic winds and floods that tore off roofs and denied housing.
Authorities attributed the hurricane to at least 14 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including those of three inmates at a senior care center who were evacuated, along with hundreds of other residents, to a warehouse in Louisiana. before the Passage. State health authorities have opened an investigation into these deaths and a fourth at another warehouse in Tangipahoa parish, where they say conditions are increasingly unhealthy and unsafe.
The department reported one more death on Friday, that of a 59-year-old man intoxicated with carbon monoxide from a generator believed to be operating inside his home. Several of the deaths recorded after the storm had a similar cause.
More than 800,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity Friday in southeastern Louisiana, according to the Public Service Commission. That’s about 36% of all customers in the state, but less than the nearly 1.1 million people affected after the arrival of the meteor on Sunday with winds of up to 230 km / h (150 mph).