After flying over some of the areas hit hardest during Hurricane Ida, two members of Congress from Louisiana described catastrophic devastation ranging from flooding and power grid failures to severe wind damage across a wide swath of the state. The damage creates a massive challenge for first responders and emergency management systems struggling to save lives.
Sen. Bill Cassidy and Rep. Garret Graves said the storm was unique for its strength — perhaps the strongest to strike Louisiana in modern history — and the scope of destruction it left behind: from families stranded inside flooded homes and the New Orleans power grid failure to anticipated large-scale impacts on the American oil and gas industry.
The two surveyed the damage from a U.S. Coast Guard plane late Monday morning.
"This is still a live disaster, a live emergency," Graves told reporters after disembarking the plane. He described some areas where "water is still going up, not down" and emphasized that the recovery will be long.
He said Grand Isle and surrounding coastal communities looked overall worse than ever.
Flooding poses the greatest threat in LaPlace and other areas surrounding New Orleans, as well as many communities in Livingston and Tangipahoa parishes and on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain. But the winds were vicious too, Cassidy said.
Cassidy described entire roofs ripped off, exposing the contents of warehouses and apartments, and mobile home parks where "the trailers were like Tinker Toys scattered about." Farther south along the coast, he said the inundation of water made it impossible to tell "what was wetlands and what was land."
"Anybody who saw what we saw would be personally devastated," he said. "South Louisiana has been hit, and it has been hit hard."
Graves said the most important thing right now is triaging the various needs. He compared the state emergency response infrastructure to the always versatile Swiss army knife, saying the system is among the best because unfortunately it gets tested so often.
President Joe Biden has already approved a major disaster declaration for all of southeastern Louisiana, activating federal dollars for recovery costs. Cassidy and Graves praised the White House for being attentive to the situation leading up to the Sunday afternoon landfall. They also promised to do everything possible to avoid a repeat of the situation in Lake Charles, which was hit by two hurricanes last year and has since struggled to get adequate recovery resources from the federal government.
Though reluctant to compare tragedies, Graves said Ida produced wide-ranging impacts for the state — exactly 16 years after Katrina, a weaker storm at landfall, devastated New Orleans following widespread levee failures.
"I know this is an awful experience," he said. "But we are a resilient people."