Hurricane Ida Makes Landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 Storm

Source: New York Times

Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 4 storm, battering the coast and threatening destruction in New Orleans as the storm stands to be one of the most devastating to strike the city since Hurricane Katrina.

The storm’s maximum sustained winds on Sunday morning reached 150 miles an hour, closing in on the 157 m.p.h. winds of a Category 5 storm. In New Orleans and across southeast Louisiana, residents were bracing themselves for the worst of the hurricane.

“This is a major, major storm that is going to test us in ways that we have not been tested before,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The storm has New Orleans directly in its path. On the city’s streets Sunday morning, the wind whipped in fearsome gusts as strong as 70 miles an hour. There were few cars in motion, except for the occasional howling emergency vehicle. Downtown, a few homeless people tucked themselves into the porticos of buildings. But the people who remained in New Orleans had mostly hidden themselves away.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/29/us/hurricane-ida-updates/the-powerful-cyclone-batters-the-coast-with-wind-rain-and-storm-surge