The New Orleans area is still reeling Monday, less than a day after Ida made landfall near the city as a major hurricane.
As of 4 a.m. CT Monday, Ida had mostly made its way into Mississippi and Alabama. Though the storm has been downgraded to a tropical storm, it's continuing to dump rain on a region that has already seen significant flooding in coastal areas.
Ida currently has maximum sustained winds of 60 mph. The National Hurricane Center projects that the storm will continue to produce heavy rainfall in southeast Louisiana all day Monday and into Tuesday, causing "considerable to life-threatening" flash and urban flooding. Coastal Mississippi and southwestern Alabama will also see heavy rainfall.
The storm has caused significant damage to the local power grid, leaving the vast majority of New Orleans without electricity since Sunday evening.
"Hurricane Ida's intensity has caused catastrophic damage in its path, including a load imbalance to the company's transmission and generation," Entergy New Orleans tweeted late Sunday night. "We're making every effort to learn more and rectify."
According to PowerOutage.us, more than 1 million customers in Louisiana are without power, in addition to more than 100,000 in Mississippi. Entergy later noted that it was "providing backup generation" to the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board.
UPDATE: We have provided back-up generation to the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board. Power will not be restored this evening, but we will continue work to remedy. For more: https://t.co/o8I3M5NnbG
— Entergy New Orleans (@EntergyNOLA) August 30, 2021
Officials have already attributed one death to the storm. The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office said on Facebook that a person northwest of New Orleans had died potentially in a falling tree incident.
With 150 mph winds upon landfall, Ida was one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall in the state. It arrived on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people when it made landfall in 2005.
