Ida Aftermath: 600,000 People Without Clean Water, 2,000 Pollution Reports
The latest major storm to hit U.S. shores, Hurricane Ida, has left significant drinking water and source water issues in its wake.
The Category 4 storm hit in late August, causing catastrophic flooding across much of the country and leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the Southeast without power or access to drinking water.
“51 water systems across Louisiana, each serving between 25 and 20,000 people, remained shut down due to Ida,” Grist reported. “Another 242 remained under boil water advisories. Around 642,000 people remain without access to clean water, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.”
The hurricane destroyed power lines in Louisiana, rendering water systems unable to pump groundwater or run the machinery that treats it. Many of those water systems that maintain backup generators have also been unable to power their operations, as fuel shortages have plagued the state. Furthermore, flooding from Ida has meant that infrastructure like pump stations and drinking water pipelines are damaged and inaccessible.
“Underlying the immediate devastation is the fact that Louisiana has one of the worst water systems in the country, which has left it vulnerable to storms like Ida,” per Grist. “Nearly 60 percent of Louisiana’s water systems — 1,335 — are more than half a century old.”
Ida has not just devastated drinking water treatment operations in the region. It has also left source water significantly worse off than it was before, adding to the challenges faced by water systems.
“The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed … it has assessed more than 800 of over 2,000 reports of pollution in the wake of Hurricane Ida,” according to Axios. “Nearly 350 of these have been reports of oil spills.”
In response to the reports, the Coast Guard has established a pollution response team in Baton Rouge and has been conducting flyover assessment of Louisiana’s southeastern coast. It plans to follow up on every report, but if even a fraction of them indicate real oil spills in the area’s source water, the region’s treatment operations have a daunting task ahead as they address the critical damage as well.
To read more about how major storms impact water systems, visit Water Online’s Stormwater Management Solutions Center.