Hurricane Ida intensified early Sunday with sustained winds of 150 miles an hour after crossing the warmest and deepest part of the Gulf of Mexico, reaching the second-highest classification for hurricanes. Local officials urged people to shelter in place, and many people said they were already losing power.
Strong winds whipped through New Orleans, where normally busy streets were largely empty after many people in the hurricane’s path heeded evacuation orders. Those who stayed behind were hunkering down on Sunday.
A day earlier, the National Weather Service in New Orleans had warned people to follow evacuation orders. “You do not want to play around with your life and it is not worth it to stay if you have the means to leave.”
Parts of the region could see rainfall of 20 inches or more in addition to threatening storm surges, the weather service said. A surge of 12 feet to 16 feet is expected at Port Fourchon, La., south of New Orleans, to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Tornadoes were possible from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle. The weather service also issued an extreme wind warning on Sunday for areas near New Orleans.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the hurricane was hitting as hospitals were already burdened with Covid-19 patients. He added, however, that many people had left southeast Louisiana. He previously said Ida would be one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the state since at least the 1850s.
“It’s going to be a very challenging storm for our state, and it comes at a very difficult time as well,” he said during a television interview on Sunday. “We’re hopeful that enough people got out that we will avoid the very worst that this storm could offer in terms of storm-surge related death.”
The storm is likely to be the biggest test yet for New Orleans’s $14.5 billion flood-protection system, which was designed to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic flooding and destruction following Katrina. The hurricane, which made landfall exactly 16 years ago to the day, killed more than 1,800 people and caused more than $100 billion in property damage.
The new system includes flood walls, levees, canals and barriers constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority said Saturday that it closed a series of floodgates in the federal levee system to prevent storm surge ahead of the hurricane. New Orleans’s police and fire departments staged boats and high-water vehicles in flood-prone areas.
In New Orleans, it was drizzling slightly Sunday morning with a few wind gusts as gray clouds swept over the city. Few cars passed as the city was on lockdown.
Restaurants, bars and other businesses in and around New Orleans had been closed since Saturday afternoon. Stores, bars and restaurants were boarded up and fortified with sandbags as early as Saturday. Even 24-7 dive bars such as Ms. Mae’s and Brothers 3 closed Saturday morning. Only a Walmart, a Winn-Dixie and a few other stores were open Saturday in the city’s uptown neighborhood.
Many people in low-lying areas had moved their cars to higher ground. By Saturday night, only a few people strolled down Bourbon Street in the normally packed French Quarter.
The hurricane comes as Louisiana hospitals are already struggling with high numbers of Covid-19 patients. Cases from the highly contagious Delta variant have surged in the state, and officials cautioned that any casualties from the storm would further strain the system. Some residents cited that risk as an additional reason for evacuating.
Austin Lane, 38 years old, who owns a Mexican restaurant called El Cucuy, planned to ride out the storm Sunday just to the north in Carriere, Miss. He drove out of New Orleans on Saturday afternoon with his girlfriend, Meghan Ackerman, 40, their four dogs, two cats and two chickens.
Most of his 19 employees also evacuated, some to Houston and one to as far away as Missouri, he said.
To hunker down, the couple brought a generator, headlamps, candles, two crates of water, sausage, and a bottle of bourbon. If the winds pick up at the property they own, they plan to use two cat carriers to bring the chickens indoors.
“By no means is it a supersafe destination,” Mr. Lane said. “It’s still in the path of the hurricane. It’s just the best I could do after I got my people out and could lock the place up.”
The National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane warning for New Orleans, Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas in Louisiana, and along the Gulf Coast from Intracoastal City to the mouth of the Pearl River at the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
On Saturday, traffic leaving the city on Interstate 10 over Lake Pontchartrain had been bumper-to-bumper as people evacuated. But some stayed behind to ride out the storm.
In Houma, La., which is expected to get 10 feet of storm surge, Dr. Howard Russell, 65, said he was planning to stay home Sunday, even though his daughter Gabrielle Russell, a 23-year-old nursing student, evacuated from New Orleans to Kingwood, Texas.
Ms. Russell said she was worried about her father staying in the house where she grew up, because there is a lake beyond their backyard. “We’ll be experiencing quite a few feet of water. You just never know how much rain can build up,” she said.
Her father, who will be in the house alone, boarded up its front door and planned to watch the news Sunday. He said he has enough gas to run his generator for a week and supplies to last a month. But he was still hoping that the storm would pass and that he would be able to drive to work Monday morning.
“It’s not my first rodeo,” Dr. Russell said. “My biggest fears are all my shingles coming off my roof.”