Hurricane Ida made landfall at around 5pm local time near Port Fourchon in Louisiana with wind speeds of 150 mph. Ida brought extensive damage across southern Louisiana and Mississippi, where over 1M people are currently without electricity.

At the time of writing Ida had been downgraded to a tropical storm and was moving north over southwestern Mississippi. Warnings for storm surge and flooding damage had been issued for the lower parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

In a television interview on CNBC, Brandy Christian, president and CEO of the Port of New Orleans and President of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad, said Ida was “mostly a major wind event” coupled with a tremendous amount of rain.

Port staff were able to do a brief visual inspection in the evening on 29 August after the worst of the hurricane had passed. “We didn’t see any major issues,” Christian said. There were some “water leakage” problems, “but fortunately the port is all within the $14 billion Federal flood protection system.” She credited this with preventing serious damage.

Christian cautioned that the port still needed to wait for daylight hours to do a full inspection, but the first issues to address when day breaks will be clearing roadways and restoring electricity.

Ida’s windspeed is very similar to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Comparing Ida to Katrina, Christian said Ida “was more of a wind event.” The port and the Public Belt Railroad that it operates were also better prepared for Ida, having taken on board the lessons learned from Katrina.

Surviving Ida is important not only for the port’s current businesses, but for its plan for the new Louisiana International Container Terminal (LIT). On 26 August the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans approved a contract for Program Management and Program Control Services to HDR Engineering, Inc., a global engineering and consulting firm, as part of the multi-year due diligence and permitting process for LIT.

The site for the new terminal is located within the flood protection system that was put in place after Katrina. That the system appears at this point to have protected the port in a category 4 (almost category 5) hurricane is important to the project’s viability.

Other ports in Ida’s path include Fourchon and Baton Rouge. Fourchon is an oil and gas port and was in the eye of the hurricane when it made landfall. Lafourche Parish President Archie Chaisson said Ida was “everything we expected and more.”  The parish area is currently without drinking water and power. He said rumours that levees had been breached were not correct. Some water did come over the top of the levees in the wind, but there had been no major breaches. Damage to houses and buildings, however, is extensive and the recovery is expected to take weeks.