Officials in Louisiana are still assessing the damage from Hurricane Ida, but two things are already clear: While there was widespread flooding around the state, the systems built to defend New Orleans mostly held up. The $14.5 billion flood-protection system around the city has almost 200 miles of barriers, and floodwater didn’t spill over anywhere. Nor did any of those barriers suffer structural failure. All eight transmission lines that bring electricity into New Orleans, however, failed in the hours after Ida struck. And, as my colleague Ivan Penn reported, a natural gas power plant meant to power the city in an emergency did not come to the rescue.

Source: International New York Times September 01, 2021 16:58 UTC