Usa, Hurricane Ida is scary. 16 years ago the devastation of Katrina

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August 28, 2021 Eyes are once again on the city of New Orleans, where the sun is still high. A postcard image that will change in a few hours as it did 16 years ago. Here came Hurricane Katrina and in a few hours perhaps, the devastation it wreaked might be just a pale memory. The city is deserted but behind that silence the evacuation plan has already started for the arrival of another hurricane: Ida. After leaving the Cuban coast, Ida now scares the United States and, in particular, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The National Weather Service (NWS) predicts that it will touch land on Sunday as an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, but heavy rains are expected in the next few hours with winds forecasted up to 200km / h. Ida risks wiping out and rendering coastal areas of the state uninhabitable "for weeks and months," warned the National Weather Service, the government's weather forecasting agency. "Ida is extremely dangerous," warns the Hurricane Center.

The mayor of New Orleans, La Toya Cantrell, speaks of a "dramatic threat". "Voluntary evacuations are underway but time is not on our side and at this point we can no longer order compulsory evacuations," he said, explaining that doing so would create further traffic jams on the roads and complicate rescue in case things should precipitate suddenly. In the city of New Orleans, shops lock their windows with wood, supermarkets are stormed, homes secured as safe as possible, tourists sent home. There is deafening silence in the French Quarter. There is a lot of fear among the residents. The fact that Ida is expected on Katrina's anniversary is not seen as a good sign. Add to this that Ida is predicted to be a Category 4 hurricane: Katrina, who was'Category 3 alone, it caused over 1,800 deaths, billions of dollars in damage. All without counting Covid, which exposes the population to further risks.

Joe Biden follows weather developments from the White House fearing the worst, or the repetition of the 'nightmare' George W. Bush, the former president at the crossroads between the war in Afghanistan which he had started in response to 9/11 and overwhelmed by criticism for the 'debacle' on Katrina. Biden heard from the governor of Louisiana and took stock with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and received assurances about the preparations. Civil protection has in fact reported that it has already positioned generators of electricity, food and water in the Gulf of Mexico in order to be immediately ready to respond to any emergency. The fear is that Ida moves slowly on the ground: this would mean more intense rains and therefore a higher risk of flooding especially in New Orleans,which remains vulnerable despite billionaire investments after Katrina.