Assessing the damages from hurricane Ida
|Summary
On August 29, Hurricane Ida made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane, exactly 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.
Louisiana appears to have been hit the hardest by the storm. While power has been restored for many, repairs to the power grid are expected to take weeks. New Orleans' tourism industry, one of the metro's key economic drivers, will likely be sidelined for an extended period.
Negative economic effects extend to the broader U.S. economy as well. Freight movement from the Port of New Orleans came to a standstill, and millions of barrels of crude oil production were interrupted, as was natural gas output.
Torrential downpours took many areas by surprise as the storm moved north. That said, the lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 likely prevented even greater damages. Many buildings in the Northeast have been retrofitted to better withstand the impacts of extreme weather.
Severe weather events are becoming less rare and the overall losses incurred by these catastrophes are on the rise. Hurricane Ida serves as a reminder that even inland areas may need to devise their own natural disaster mitigation strategies.
Hurricane Ida devastates the east coast
On August 29, Hurricane Ida arrived in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane with over 150 mile-per-hour winds registered in some locations. Ida, which was the fifth most powerful hurricane to hit the United States, dumped 10-15 inches of rain near its landfall location and brought a storm surge of 5-12 feet. After making landfall, the intensity of the storm lessened, and Ida was downgraded to a tropical storm as it coursed up through the Eastern Heartland and into the Northeast. While wind speeds died down, the rain did not, bringing flooding, agricultural ruin, infrastructure damage and general destruction for areas in the storm’s path.
Louisiana appears to have been hit the hardest by Ida. The storm prompted evacuations of thousands of residents and the intense winds knocked out power for over one million households in Louisiana and Mississippi. While power has been restored for many households and businesses throughout New Orleans, repairs are expected to take weeks. The tourism industry, which is still battling pandemic-related challenges and is one of the metro's key economic drivers, will likely be sidelined for an extended period. Many hotels, bars and restaurants remain shuttered, and live events that were scheduled to take place in the city have been canceled, postponed or relocated. Notably, the New Orleans Saints were forced to play their home opener in Jacksonville, Florida. According to Smith Travel Research (STR), over 150 New Orleans hotels are still temporarily closed due to power outages, staffing issues and vendors being offline.
The Louisiana economy is still on the mend from the pandemic-induced downturn, and the hurricane damages will only serve to prolong the region's recovery. After Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, the unemployment rate spiked from 5.6% in August to 11.4% in September. It wasn't until January 2006 that the jobless rate returned to the levels seen before the storm. New Orleans' labor market was particularly affected. The metro area lost more than 184,000 jobs in the two months following Katrina, a 30% decline. Industry payrolls partially bounced back in the months after, but the metro's employment base never returned to pre-Katrina levels. At the start of 2020, before the pandemic hit, payrolls in New Orleans were still about 4.5%, or 28,000 jobs, short of the level seen before Katrina. COVID has brought an entirely new set of challenges for the region. New Orleans lost over 111,000 jobs during the lockdown phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. As of July 2020, the Big Easy's economy has only recouped about 49,000 of those jobs. Even though the damages appear to be relatively smaller than those inflicted by Katrina, the one-two punch of the pandemic and Hurricane Ida will likely weigh heavily on the region's economic recovery.
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