As of 7:00 AM ET on Saturday, Hurricane Ida is a Category 1 storm with maximum winds of 85 mph, heading northwest after crossing western Cuba overnight. However, the National Hurricane Center predicts that Ida will continue to strengthen throughout the day as it passes over the warm waters of the central Gulf of Mexico. The latest forecast shows the storm becoming a major Category 3 storm by Sunday morning, and as Ida nears the coast of Louisiana, the NHC expects it to grow still more intense, making landfall as a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds. That would make Ida stronger than Hurricane Katrina at the time it reached New Orleans in 2005, and put it on par with Hurricane Laura, which crashed into western Louisiana last year.

At the time of this writing, the path of the storm looks to take it west of New Orleans. However, that path has shifted over 50 miles to the east in just the last 12 hours. Ida is now projected to make landfall around the town of Houma, just 50 miles west of New Orleans. Not only does this mean that higher winds, more rain, and a larger surge are likely to strike the New Orleans area on the anniversary of Katrina, by being just to the west of the city, but New Orleans is on the “dirty” side of the storm; the side where the storm’s own rotation makes things simply worse. The surge warning for the storm now carries predicted levels of 10 to 15 feet. In some areas, the surge may reach 20 feet—high enough to completely cover large areas several miles inland. Low-lying areas of the coast west of New Orleans are expected to be fully inundated. What this means for the city itself will be up to series of levees that protect most of the area. However, the NHC is calling for “devastating winds, life-threatening surge,” and “heavy rainfall.”

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a state of emergency and asked residents to please listen to the warnings. For those in low-lying areas new the coast, those plans should be simple: Get out. Coastal port towns and areas for several dozen miles inland are expected to be completely inundated. Anyone who can move should move, and those who can’t move should be contacting local authorities to learn about options for shelter—or better still, transport out of the area. 

But Edwards’ warning carries a coda that’s not been present in most such cautions: “Now is the time for people to finalize their emergency game plan, which should take into account the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.”

Over the last seven days, Louisiana ranks behind only Mississippi and Florida when it comes to cases of COVID-19 per capita. Hospitals across the state are simply full. Not only are ICUs full, but regular beds are full, pediatric wards are full, emergency rooms are full. Patients are already being treated in hallways, in tents, and in parking areas turned into makeshift extensions. Under normal circumstances, many hospital patients would already be on their way to rooms in safer areas, but with the explosion of delta variant cases across the Southeast, those rooms are already full. Whether it’s Louisiana or Mississippi, inland to Arkansas, or west to Texas, there simply is nowhere to shift patients in a healthcare system facing record demand for beds.

That means that hospitals—and the already exhausted and long overworked nurses, doctors, and EMTs—have no choice but to stay where they are. Everyone else may, and should, be leaving. But these health care professionals have to stay with their patients and hope that preparations for maintaining power, water, and supplies are adequate in the face of a powerful storm.

Expected path of Hurricane Ida as of Saturday morning

During Katrina, both hospitals and extended care facilities in and around New Orleans found themselves short of power, short of medications, and facing rising floodwaters. This generated a number of horror stories, like that at Memorial Medical Center, where the question of whether the doctors present were heroes, murderers, or both still remains difficult to resolve.

In 2017, Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare published “Five Lessons Learned from Katrina.”  Unfortunately, one of those lessons was that evacuations should have been more extensive—and that simply doesn’t seem possible in this case. Another of those lessons is that hospitals need to be able to shift patients and resources between them, but the pandemic overflow also makes that a lot less possible. Whether the other lessons—on keeping supply lines open and maintaining communications—are useful will depend on how well each facility has practiced the final step: drills and preparing in advance.

One thing is excessively clear: Anyone who is in the area and can leave, should leave. Anyone in the area who can’t leave should seek shelter. And everyone should absolutely take every step possible to avoid both COVID-19 and any injuries.

In the wake of Ida, there will be damage from devastating winds. There will be flooding from a massive storm surge. There will be flash floods, downed trees, power failures, blocked roads, and extremely difficult conditions from the combination of wind, surge, and heavy rains. The situation is going to be both extremely difficult and extraordinarily dangerous. And even those who normally shrug all that off should be running right now, because what there will not be is any hospital beds.

If you can get out, get out. Do so safely, but do it now, because time is running out quickly. 

Saturday, Aug 28, 2021 · 1:52:24 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner