WH held a briefing for questions on the response and the first 30 minutes were reporters asking about Afghanistan instead. They have a disease.
It sounds like this time the problem isn't so much flooding thanks to a smaller storm surge/wind field and improved levees, but extreme destruction of the power grid. I don't know how long it takes to repair major transmission lines that were toppled but I can't imagine it's a fast process.
My friend in New Orleans is optimistic about his house still being there. Which is great because they clearly love the place.
See, already this thread is cheering me up. I forgot how much of Katrina damage was storm surge and that relatively speaking, wind damage is the more important force in Ida, which seems less horrible. In response to the reversing of flow a wag was calling it the ippississiM. On brand for here.
I don't know how long it takes to repair major transmission lines that were toppled but I can't imagine it's a fast process.
The local utility is estimating weeks for the hardest hit areas; earlier they had said up to three weeks based on past experience, but the actual damage seems to be worse than they've had at least in the recent past. The main thing seems to be that one transmission tower was knocked down, which led to all eight of the transmission lines into New Orleans going down. Transmission towers are huge and it's rare for them to sustain this kind of damage, so it'll take a while for a complete fix.
Most customers should have power back within days rather than weeks, though. Once the winds die down and the floodwaters receded they'll be able to get bucket trucks out to fix the distribution lines, and they should be able to simultaneously get generation back online and reroute power through the undamaged parts of the transmission system.
I've spent a chunk of my career looking at hurricane-damaged power infrastructure and the damage in Louisiana doesn't seem that bad compared to what I've seen after, say, Hurricane Matthew in Grand Bahama.
From what I can tell, most of the distribution system hasn't been turned into broken toothpicks on the ground, aside from occasional damage from falling trees. A lost transmission tower is bad but not unheard of. If it was just a single tower, there may have been an issue with its construction that contributed to its failure, but it doesn't seem to have pulled down the other towers with it.
The most important thing about this storm is that the storm surge stayed away from New Orleans.
"Mississippi River Running Backwards" (Tom Russell) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzUi5tXywac
In Chicago, they have a river that flows backwards all the time.
Do those work with white wine and butter?
It appears that the hardest hit place was Grand Isle (which did seem to be right about where it made landfall). Small barrier island type place west of the main delta at the end of Bayou Lafourche (which was once a natural Mississippi river cutoff--so between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya). Very exposed and one of those "no place to run when death comes from the sea" places (during the storm I had heard that 18 people had chosen to stay).
I was there once in the 70s. All I really recall was fashioning a patch for bunged up mega-joint at the request of some hyper-stoned offshore oil rig worker while at the beach.
For those not following the Caldor fire, they gave an evacuation order for South Lake Tahoe this afternoon, resulting in gridlocked roads (traffic not great at the best of times). Time lapse video from Heavenly is fairly terrifying. Sounds like fire crews are very miserable up there; my heart goes out to them.
1: They have a disease.
They most certainly do.
Richard Engel today: worst capitulation of western values in our lifetimes"
And they demand the hair shirt: Jim Sciutto: What we're not hearing here from @SecBlinken is an acknowledgment of miscalculation in the withdrawal or the planning for it.