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Ida leaves damage along Gulf Coast

Tropical Weather
Posted at 4:18 PM, Aug 30, 2021
and last updated 2021-08-30 17:19:28-04

We're starting to get a clearer look at the damage caused by Hurricane Ida along the Gulf Coast.

Ida left more than a million customers without power, including the entire city of New Orleans.

Entergy Louisiana said Sunday that some of its customers could be without power for weeks.

The storm made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane early Sunday afternoon, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

A Covington couple says they are blessed after a falling tree narrowly missed the husband in the kitchen.

"He was in the kitchen getting something out of the fridge, and that tree just crushed through," Yolanda Bendernagal said. "The beam in the attic hit his head, and the glass from the two windows cut him up. And my daughter's a nurse, so she ran in there. She was screaming, pulling through fiberglass, you know, yanking it out of the way to pull him out."

A resident in LaPlace stayed in the attic to survive the hurricane.

"The water was just coming in so fast that, you know, it got to about knee level so quick. I didn't know if it was going to stay there rise. So I just went up to the attic, and it didn't get too much higher than that, but it was scary. It came in all at once," a LaPlace resident said.

The resident was worried he was going to get trapped.

"I was because, I mean, you hear stories, you know, you hear people that, you know, 7, 8, 9, and I just, I don't know what I would've done if it was that. I mean, I guess I would've just had to fight my way out and swim. My dad taught me how to swim," a LaPlace resident said.

The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office said the storm claimed its first victim when a tree fell on a home.

President Joe Biden has granted Louisiana's request for a major disaster declaration.