The president’s motorcade drives past a Hurricane Ida-hit area as U.S. President Joe Biden begins his tour of the hurricane-hit areas of Louisiana on September 3, 2021.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
More than a week after Hurricane Ida struck the area, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana and thousands in Mississippi were left without power when a new storm front struck that threatened recovery efforts.
According to PowerOutage.us, the numbers on Monday afternoon were 495,384 Louisiana customers and 4,656 in Mississippi with no power.
The National Weather Service released a flash flood clock for southeast Louisiana early Monday.
Showers and thunderstorms were expected, with the strongest able to produce three inches or more of rain in a short period of time.
“The soil is saturated or almost saturated and heavy rainfall can quickly lead to flash floods,” the warning reads.
Utilities company Entergy said in a company statement on Monday morning, “Storms could hinder recovery in areas where conditions become unsafe for our recovery team to continue their work.”
Entergy also reported that 54%, or 513,000, of its customers had already restored their power, out of a total of 948,000 who lost power during Hurricane Ida.
About 902,000 of the affected Entergy customers were in Louisiana. As of Monday, the company announced that it had restored power to nearly half of them, or 467,000, including about 66% of those hit by power outages in New Orleans. In New Orleans, 69,000 Entergy customers were without power on Monday morning.
As Gizmodo recently reported, Entergy has a history of protests against policies that would lead to greater use of renewable energy and investments in solar and energy storage systems in Louisiana. In addition to generating electricity from clean, renewable sources, such systems usually provide more stability wherever they are built and can help to provide or restore electricity after natural disasters.
Entergy wrote that amid new flash flood warnings in the region, “recovery times extend to September 29th at the latest” for the hardest hit parishes such as the parish of St. Charles and the parish of Terrebonne. That’s a full month after Hurricane Ida hit land.
