NEW ORLEANS, March 23 – Crews were assessing the damage on Wednesday on the east side of New Orleans where a powerful tornado killed at least one person and injured eight others as it left a two-mile path of destroyed homes, uprooted power lines and overturned vehicles.
A dark funnel cloud touched down at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (0030 GMT Wednesday), flattening buildings and flipping over vehicles in the Arabi area of St. Bernard Parish.
A spokesperson for the parish, just east of downtown New Orleans, said first responders found a 26-year-old man dead near his home. Eight other people were taken to a hospital with minor injuries, parish spokesperson John Lane said.
“Everybody has been accounted for that we know of at this point,” he said, adding that search and rescue teams had finished most of their work.
National Weather Service meteorologists surveying the damage said on Wednesday that the tornado was at least an EF3 on the five-point Enhanced Fujita Scale, packing winds of 136 to 165 mph (219 to 266 kph).
Much of southern Louisiana is still recovering from Hurricane Ida, a fierce Category 4 storm last August that devastated rural communities to the south of New Orleans and killed more than 100 people in several U.S. states and the Caribbean.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration said it was allocating more than $1.7 billion to Louisiana after the last two destructive hurricane seasons, local media reported.
New Orleans, a city with a majority-Black population, is still traumatized by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the most powerful storms in U.S. history, which killed at least 1,800 people.
Lane said crews and local officials were going block to block, assessing the damage left behind by the tornado, which appeared to have stayed on a straight path for about 2 miles (3 km).
“The path the storm took – it’s devastation,” he said. “It did major destruction. Houses are off their foundations and into the street, no longer there, just blown to pieces.”
The tornado largely spared Orleans Parish and the City of New Orleans to the west, where no injuries or significant damage were reported, Mayor Latoya Cantrell said in a news briefing.
Cantrell said she was declaring a state of emergency “out of an abundance of caution” and to enable access to any federal government resources that New Orleans would be eligible for in the future.
ONCE HOMES, NOW RUBBLE
Residents spent the day picking through debris and climbing rubble piles where their houses and businesses once stood while utility crews worked to repair downed power lines along city streets.
“”It sounded like a train and I just said, ‘No, no, no,'” a woman told television station WDSU. “I really thought I was going to die.”
Some 2,300 homes and businesses in St. Bernard Parish and 700 customers in Orleans Parishwere without power on Wednesday afternoon, according to Entergy (ETR.N), the local power company.
The same storm front that produced Tuesday’s tornado brought heavy rain and winds to other parts of Louisiana, and to Mississippi and Alabama. It came a day after twisters destroyed homes and injured people elsewhere in the region.
The system moved to the east and was producing strong thunderstorms along Florida’s Panhandle on Wednesday. It could potentially bring damaging winds, tornados and hail to the region throughout the day, the National Weather Service said.
“As the action moves east this afternoon, we are concerned about severe weather,” weather service meteorologist Andy Haner said. “The storm system as a whole has lost a lot of punch.”
