Hurricane Ida strikes Louisiana, then floods the Northeast
A powerful landfall was followed days later by catastrophic flash flooding more than a thousand miles away.
Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana this August as a powerful Category 4 storm, battering the coast with ferocious winds and a dangerous surge, and then, days later, unleashed catastrophic flash flooding across the Northeast more than a thousand miles away.
Ida came ashore near Port Fourchon on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, with sustained winds around 150 miles per hour. The strengthened levee system around New Orleans held, a hard-won success after Katrina, but the storm knocked out power to the entire city and devastated communities to the south and west, leaving many without electricity for weeks in sweltering heat.
As Ida's remnants swept northeast, they interacted with another weather system to produce an extraordinary deluge over the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Record rainfall overwhelmed cities from Philadelphia to New York, where dozens died, many trapped in flooded basement apartments as water rose with terrifying speed.
Ida was a vivid illustration of the compound dangers of a modern hurricane, which can threaten lives through wind and surge at landfall and then through inland freshwater flooding far from the coast.
The storm's enormous reach, striking the Gulf Coast and the Northeast within days, drove home how the hazards of tropical systems extend far beyond the shoreline, and how a warming atmosphere, able to hold more moisture, raises the risk of the extreme rainfall that increasingly defines these storms.