PORT FOURCHON, La. (KLFY) – Video that shows Hurricane Ida making landfall in Louisiana Sunday has a man wondering if his building has been destroyed by the Category 4 storm.
A before-and-after comparison helps explains his confusion. On the left, you see the blue building, which Jeremy DiBenedetto said he just finished remodeling last month. On the right, the area where the building is supposed to be is fully obscured by the storm.
“All I can say is WOW!!” DiBenedetto wrote on Facebook. “I’m not sure if anyone has ever gotten footage like this ever before, but the power of this storm is totally UNBELIEVABLE!!”
“We’re not sure if she’s still standing, but the dock is still there,” he wrote. He said construction crews had just “spent several weeks raising and rebuilding it to practically new.”
“Everything happens for a reason they say, so God had different plans for us.”
Hurricane Ida blasted ashore Sunday as one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S., blowing off roofs and reversing the flow of the Mississippi River as it rushed from the Louisiana coast toward New Orleans and one of the nation’s most important industrial corridors.
The Category 4 storm hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years earlier, coming ashore about 45 miles west of where Category 3 Katrina first struck land. Ida’s 150-mph winds tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the mainland U.S.
The rising ocean swamped the barrier island of Grand Isle as landfall came just to the west at Port Fourchon. Ida made a second landfall about two hours later near Galliano. The hurricane was churning through the far southern Louisiana wetlands, with the more than 2 million people living in and around New Orleans and Baton Rouge under threat.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
