With electricity still out for hundreds of thousands of customers and a punishing heat settling over southern Louisiana, officials warned on Tuesday that recovery from Hurricane Ida could take days or even weeks, and search-and-rescue efforts continued for those still stranded in the storm’s aftermath.
Gov. John Bel Edwards put the situation in stark terms and offered no timeline for when the state would be able to welcome back residents who had fled the storm.
“Many of the life-supporting infrastructure elements are not present, they’re not operating right now,” Edwards said Tuesday. “So if you have already evacuated, do not return here or elsewhere in southeast Louisiana until the office of emergency preparedness tells you it’s ready to receive you.”
More than 1 million utility customers remained without power on Tuesday, including much of New Orleans, where all eight transmission lines that ordinarily deliver power to the city were knocked out of service. In Mississippi, about 60,000 customers lacked electricity, according to reports compiled by PowerOutage.us.
Inability to run air-conditioning threatened to become a dangerous problem for vulnerable residents of the region, as heat and humidity made the air in much of southern Louisiana and Mississippi feel hotter than 100 degrees on Tuesday.
Like the governor, local officials warned residents who left ahead of the storm to stay away for now. Basic services like emergency response, and everyday amenities of modern life like water, sewage and passable roadways, could not be guaranteed in many places, they said.
At least five deaths have been attributed to the storm, officials said. In Louisiana, a man was killed while driving in New Orleans; a woman was found dead in Jean Lafitte, south of the city; and a man was killed in Prairieville, about 20 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, where a tree fell on a house. In Mississippi, two people were killed and 10 were injured when a highway collapsed.
Entergy, a major power company in Louisiana, said on Monday that it would probably “take days to determine the extent of damage to our power grid and far longer to restore electrical transmission to the region.”
Some local officials warned that outages could stretch as long as a month.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
