‘Catastrophic’ flooding caused by Hurricane Ida devastates Louisiana town, mayor says
Search and rescue efforts are underway in a small Louisiana city hours after Hurricane Ida battered the southeastern part of the state, leaving some areas underwater and in “total devastation.”
Mayor Tim Kerner of Jean Lafitte said the town suffered “catastrophic” flooding Sunday after Ida, which has since weakened to a tropical storm, made landfall as a major Category 4 hurricane. The small community, located roughly 20 miles south of New Orleans, sits on Bayou Barataria — outside the Jefferson Parish levee protection system.
“We’ve suffered flooding before, we’ve suffered storms before,” Kerner told CNN’s Michael Holmes on Sunday. “But I’ve never seen water like this in my life, and it just hit us in the worst way possible.”
Rapidly rising floodwaters overtopped the town’s levees, the mayor told WGNO, and an estimated 200 were left stranded after “a vessel got loose and took out the (swing) bridge.”
“We’ve lost our school, everything,” Kerner told the news station. “But now with people’s lives ... it’s turned into a total rescue mission. People’s lives, I believe, are at stake now and we’re trying to get to them as fast as we can. As soon as this weather [breaks], we’re going to send an army to them.”
Late Sunday, Kerner assured residents that rescue boats would be out to assist those in “imminent danger” after the city’s levees were breached.
Some south Louisiana residents took to social media for help as Ida brought an excessive amount of rain, dangerous winds and risk of “life threatening storm surge” to the region.
A mandatory evacuation was issued for Jean Lafitte and surrounding towns outside the levee protection system, including Barataria, Crown Point and lower Lafitte. However, an estimated 400 residents were unable to leave ahead of the storm due to physical or financial reasons, Jean Lafitte Police Chief Marcel Rodriguez told WWNO.
“I’m being told that there was 10 foot of water an hour ago in lower Lafitte. I would suspect that it’s higher now,” he told he station on Sunday. “The people that didn’t leave, they got some people probably thought they could wait it out ... But the ones that don’t have money to go and don’t have transportation to go in and are stuck back there, that’s sad. What do you do?”
Tropical Storm Ida continued pushing northward into Louisiana and lower Mississippi on Monday morning, packing maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. The system is expected to dump heavy rain across the region through Tuesday, causing “considerable flash and urban flooding.”
“This was just such a massive storm that it just totally devastated us,” Kerner told CNN.
This story was originally published August 30, 2021 at 12:26 PM with the headline "‘Catastrophic’ flooding caused by Hurricane Ida devastates Louisiana town, mayor says."