NEW ORLEANS (AP) – With the return of power to almost all of New Orleans for next week, Mayor LaToya Cantrell strongly encouraged residents who were evacuated due to Hurricane Ida to begin returning home. But outside the city, the prospects for recovery seemed more bleak, with no chronology about energy restoration and homes and businesses in the belly.
Six days after the arrival of Hurricane Ida, parts of Louisiana, which were hard hit, were still struggling to restore any sense of normalcy.. Even around New Orleans, the continued lack of power for most residents made a stifling summer summer hard to bear and added to the misfortunes after Ida. Louisiana authorities searched Friday for one man, they said, he shot and killed another man after they both waited in a long queue to fill up at a gas station in suburban New Orleans.
Cantrell said the city will offer transportation from Saturday to any resident who wants to get out of the city and get to a public shelter. He has already started moving some residents out of nursing homes.
On Friday, at the Renaissance Place nursing home, dozens of residents lined up to board minibuses equipped with wheelchair lifts after city officials said they determined the conditions of the facility. they were not safe and evacuated her.
Reggie Brown, 68, was one of the people waiting to join her residents on a bus. He said residents, many in wheelchairs, have been trapped at the facility since Ida. The elevators stopped working three days ago and garbage piled up inside, he said. Residents were being taken to a state shelter, the mayor reported.
“I’m going on the last bus,” Brown said. “I can work.”
A phone message for the company that manages the Renaissance site, HSI Management Inc., was not immediately returned.
But Cantrell also encouraged residents to return to the city when he returned to power, saying they could help relief efforts by welcoming neighbors and family members who were still in the dark. Only a small number of city residents had electricity on Friday, though almost all of the electricity should be returned by Wednesday, according to Entergy, the company that supplies electricity to New Orleans and much of southeastern Louisiana in the United States. storm path.
“We’re saying you can go home,” Cantrell said at a news conference.
The prospects were not so promising in the south and west of the city, where Ida’s fury struck completely. The sheriff’s office in Lafourche parish warned residents returning about the plight that awaited them: no electricity, no running water, little mobile phone service, and almost no gas.
Entergy made no promise of when the lights will be turned back on in parishes outside of New Orleans, some of which were hit for hours by winds of 100 mph (160 km / h) or more.
President Joe Biden arrived Friday to examine the damage at some of these points, traversing a neighborhood of LaPlace, a community between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain that suffered catastrophic water and wind damage that dodged rooftops and flooded homes.
“I promise we’ll have our backs,” Biden said at the start of a briefing from officials.
The president has also promised full federal support in the northeast, where Ida’s remains broke rain records and killed at least 50 people, from Virginia to Connecticut..
At least 14 people were blamed for the storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including those of three residents at residences who were evacuated along with hundreds of other elderly people to a warehouse in Louisiana. ahead of the hurricane. State health officials have begun an investigation into these deaths and a fourth at the Tangipahoa Parish Warehouse facility, where they say conditions are becoming unhealthy and unsafe.
The health department reported an additional death on Friday: a 59-year-old man who was poisoned by carbon monoxide from a generator believed to be operating in his home. Several deaths after the storm have been blamed for carbon monoxide poisoning, which can occur if the generators do not work properly.
More than 800,000 homes and businesses were left without electricity Friday evening in southeast Louisiana, according to the Public Service Commission. That’s about 36% of all utility customers across the state, but it has dropped from a peak of about 1.1 million after the storm arrived Sunday with maximum winds of 230 mph (150 mph). Ida is tied in the fifth strongest hurricane to hit the continental United States
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Deslatte reported Baton Rouge and Santana reported Marrero. The writers of the Associated Press, Chevel Johnson, in New Orleans; Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.