More than a million homes and businesses—including all of New Orleans—remain without power in the wake of Hurricane Ida, and in some areas it’s expected to take up to three weeks for power to be restored. That’s during the heat and humidity of August, leaving many people in ongoing dangerous conditions, without air conditioning or even shelter or clean drinking water.

The Washington Post described Ida as “the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster,” with water temperatures in parts of the Gulf of Mexico having warmed significantly in recent decades. That leads to storms that intensify more rapidly, while warmer air means that storms hold more moisture and dump more flooding rains.

Four people are confirmed dead as a result of Ida, with two dying when a Mississippi highway collapsed—also injuring 10 people—and, in Louisiana, one man was killed when a tree fell on his house and another man died as he tried to drive through floodwaters. But more fatalities are expected. On Monday, Gov. John Bel Edwards said on the Today Show that the number of dead would rise “considerably.” 

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“I don’t want to tell you what I’m hearing, because what I’m hearing points to a lot more than that. They’re not yet confirmed, and I really don’t want to go there,” Edwards said.

One man is missing and presumed dead after an alligator attack in the floodwaters at his home, and Cynthia Lee Sheng, the president of Jefferson Parish, said at least one person died at home in Jean Lafitte, where hundreds were forced by rising waters to take refuge in attics and on roofs.

Though the levee system protecting New Orleans held—after a nearly $15 billion upgrade following its catastrophic failure during Hurricane Katrina (infrastructure spending!)—high winds did significant damage in New Orleans, and floodwaters added to the damage in other towns.

”Every little thing that I owned and had, it’s gone,” Craig Adams, a 53-year-old resident of Houma, told The New York Times. “I’m going to have to start all over again. You always see other people going through this on the news. You never think it’s going to be you—until it is.”

In addition to all the usual damage and loss following a major hurricane, the coronavirus pandemic adds another layer of worry to Ida’s aftermath. Low vaccination rates in Louisiana and Mississippi plus crowded shelters plus overwhelmed hospitals mean “This is a pandemic tinderbox,” according to Irwin Redlener of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. Some hospitals plan to evacuate patients, but that may pose still more threat. 

”The hospitalized who have been evacuated are a problem because they are infected, and once you start moving people around, you can’t ensure all the precautions you might have if you were in a room with negative pressure and things like that,” Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School for Public Health, told USA Today.

Hurricane Ida is a natural disaster—but one with damage compounded repeatedly by human actions, from climate change to the poverty that leaves many residents unable to evacuate before a storm to the low vaccination rates that make the storm a potential COVID-19 superspreader. Republicans like to claim they’re the party of personal responsibility, but their refusal of responsibility has made all of these things much, much worse than they had to be.