New Orleans Gets Ida Relief, Nearly All Power Restored

Supply trucks are once again delivering beer on Bourbon Street and the landmark Cafe Du Monde is serving beignets, fried pastries covered with white sugar, even though there aren’t many tourists or locals around to partake of either.

With almost all the power back on in New Orleans nearly two weeks after Hurricane Ida struck, the city is showing signs of making a comeback from the Category 4 storm, which is blamed for more than two dozen deaths in the state.

More businesses are opening daily, gasoline is easier to find and many roads are lined with huge debris piles from cleanup work.

Thousands are still struggling without electricity and water outside the metro area.

It could still be weeks before power is restored in some areas, and many residents who evacuated haven’t returned.

Around New Orleans, residents are seeing signs that life is getting back to normal after Ida.

Philip Palumbo, who lives in the French Quarter and works at a bar that remains shuttered, said the citywide curfew being lifted should help restaurants and bars struggling to reopen get more customers.

“There’s not a lot around yet, but they’ll be back,” he said.

Power crews reached a “major milestone” in the New Orleans area by restoring electricity to the vast majority of customers, Phillip May, chief executive of the state’s largest power provider, Entergy Louisiana, said in a conference call with reporters.

About 201,000 of Entergy’s 205,000 customers, or 98% percent, now have power, the company said, and those that don’t had more severe damage.

More than 220,000 homes and businesses remained without power Friday in southeast Louisiana, according to the state Public Service Commission.

And while Baton Rouge and New Orleans were almost completely restored, the four hardest-hit parishes — St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, Terrebonne and Lafourche — still had 80% or more of their utility customers without power.

Now that power is mostly restored to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, more crews are heading south to the areas hardest-hit by the storm, May said.

“As we move into those harder-hit areas, the effort to restore customers becomes greater,” said May, who vowed to “keep up the pace” of restoring electricity across the region.

Across the system, “heat illness is a big concern,” said Dr. Robert Hart, Ochsner’s chief medical officer.

Hart said emergency rooms have also seen several patients stricken by carbon monoxide, a common problem after big storms as people use gas-powered generators for electricity, sometimes indoors.

Around New Orleans, progress is showing up both in lights that are back on and piles of debris that line multiple streets.

As residents return home they are stacking up wet mattresses, fractured lumber, tree limbs and other storm refuse along curbs. In the French Quarter, a big pile sat beneath balconies with decorative ironwork.

In the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, Tiffany Scott and her family had a long pile of debris along the sidewalk outside her home.

Scott said it has slowly gotten easier to get gas, ice and other supplies that were scarce immediately after the hurricane.

“We’ve been through this before, so most of us are used to knowing that we have to go drive and sit in a line,” she said. “But it’s a lot easier to find the things you need.”

Still, there is evidence the city has a ways to go before it is fully recovered.