Giving Compass' Take:
- Hurricane Ida left residents in Louisiana without power and forced hundreds of municipal water systems offline, creating a major drinking water crisis.
- How can donors help create both short and long-term solutions for this water crisis?
- Learn how Hurricane Ida exposed holes in climate preparedness.
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It has been a week and a half since Hurricane Ida hit the Gulf Coast and the devastating impacts of the Category 4 storm are still being felt throughout the region. Some 418,000 people in Louisiana remain without power, unable to run air conditioning units to deal with scorching late summer temperatures or keep food fresh in homes and grocery stores. The storm has also forced hundreds of municipal water systems offline, creating a drinking water crisis that officials warn could last weeks.
As of Tuesday, 51 water systems across Louisiana, each serving between 25 to 20,000 people, remained shut down due to Ida. Another 242 remained under boil water advisories. Around 642,000 people remain without access to clean water, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. In Mississippi, the state Department of Health has 10 active boiling water notices, affecting 7,142 people.
“There is no particular timeframe for all systems to come back up to 100 percent,” Kevin Litter, a spokesperson for Louisiana Department of Health, said in an email. “This will be different for every system and also based on location.”
The reasons for the immediate water crisis are two-fold: Across Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Ida ripped down power lines, leaving water systems unable to get the electricity they needed to pump groundwater or to run treatment facilities. Even though Louisiana mandates that all water systems have backup, fuel-powered generators, many don’t comply with the rule, Litter explained. Those who do have backup pumps are being affected by the extended blackout still crippling parts of the Gulf a week post-storm — a situation that has created fuel shortages that leave generators useless. Flooding on roads can also leave critical infrastructure, like water wells or pump stations, out of reach, making it impossible to fix storm damage. Lastly, the destruction of roads and bridges has literally ripped apart water pipelines, disrupting the whole system.
Read the full article about the water crisis by María Paula Rubiano A. at Grist.