In the “Big Easy,” traffic was heavy on westbound routes out of town and gas stations were bustling.
“Today is it,” Jamie Rhome, acting deputy director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Saturday
. “If you’re in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, you really, really have to get going because today is it in terms of protecting life and property.”
The city was scrambling to prepare ahead of Hurricane Ida, which is expected to make landfall on Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane.
Collin Arnold, the city’s emergency management director, said the city could be under high winds for about 10 hours.
Other threats include flooding in normally dry near the coast due to a combination of the tide and dangerous storm surge, heavy rainfall and even tornadoes.
“We want to be clear, that with the amount of rain now forecasted, approximately 10 inches over the course of the event, it is likely that we will experience flooding,” the city said in a Friday statement.
Some New Orleans businesses closed their doors on Saturday and other lined doors with sandbags to protect against flash floods.
The hurricane center also cautioned that storm surge could overtop some levees.
Heath Jones, emergency manager of the Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District, said levees that protect parts of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi River are designed to be overtopped — with safeguards in place to prevent additional damage.
He said that there does not appear to be any danger of storm surge coming over the levees guarding the city’s east bank.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
