Officials in Louisiana Survey Wreckage Left by Hurricane Ida

As people across southeastern Louisiana slowly began to take in the scale of damage from Hurricane Ida on Monday, a day-after accounting severely hindered by widespread power outages and limited phone service, search and rescue teams fanned out to respond to calls for help that had gone unanswered.

In Jefferson Parish, where there have been reports of people climbing into their attics to escape rising waters, the authorities had received at least 200 rescue calls since Sunday and crews were anxious to get to those who may still need their help, said Cynthia Lee Sheng, president of Jefferson Parish.

New Orleans remained without electricity. All eight transmission lines that deliver power to the city were knocked out of service by Ida, which made landfall late Sunday morning near Port Fourchon with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph. By early Monday morning, the hurricane had weakened to a tropical storm as it moved inland.

Entergy, a major power company in Louisiana, said on Twitter on Monday that it would “likely take days to determine the extent of damage to our power grid and far longer to restore electrical transmission to the region.”

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell urged residents who had evacuated not to return to the city anytime soon, given the outages and other challenges it is facing in the aftermath of the storm. “Now is not the time for re-entry into the city of New Orleans,” she said Monday afternoon.

Dozens of streets in New Orleans were flooded with runoff from the storm’s heavy rains, according to the National Weather Service, which advised people to remain sheltered in place. But the system of levees, barriers and pumps that protect New Orleans appeared to have held firm against the onslaught of Hurricane Ida, officials said.

At least one death has been attributed to the storm. A man in Prairieville, Louisiana, about 30 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, died after a tree fell on a house, according to the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .