The world’s heated state dials havoc

Natural disasters are anything but natural. They leave a trail of immense damage in their wake, as Hurricane Ida did to Louisiana. Ida slammed into the Louisiana coast as a Category 4 storm, exactly 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina made landfall, wreaking deadly havoc.

New Orleans was still mostly without power more than 24 hours after Ida slammed into the Louisiana coast as a Category 4 storm, exactly 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina made landfall, wreaking deadly havoc.

While the storm claimed just two human lives, the infrastructural damage was very high as civic workers faced the daunting task of damage control and clearing the debris. They also had to contend with the possibility of weeks without power in the stifling, late-summer heat. Ida went on the rampage like a Godzilla through the region’s power grid, leaving the entire city of New Orleans and hundreds of thousands of other Louisiana residents in the dark with no clear timeline on when power would return. Some areas outside New Orleans also suffered major flooding and structure damage.

A roadway collapsed in Mississippi on Monday night. Seven cars were involved and cranes were needed to get the cars out of the hole.

Rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-water trucks brought hundreds of people trapped by floodwaters to safety on Monday, and they planned to eventually go door to door in hard hit areas to make sure everyone got out safely. Power crews also rushed into the state. The governor said 25,000 utility workers were on the ground in Louisiana to help restore electricity, with more on the way.

More than a million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi were left without power as Ida pushed through with winds that reached 150 mph (240 kph).

In Mississippi’s southwestern corner, entire neighbourhoods were surrounded by floodwaters, and many roads were impassable. Several tornadoes were reported, including a suspected twister in Saraland, Alabama, that ripped part of the roof off a motel and flipped an 18-wheeler, injuring the driver.

The memory of Katrina, which made landfall on August 29, 2005, is still fresh in the state, where it caused some 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Disasters have a peculiar way of revisiting the places they have already targeted. In 2010, a devastating earthquake shook Haiti, the most damaging ever. A quarter of a million perished and 300,000 people were hurt, according to a report. That is not all, about 1.5 million individuals were forced to live in makeshift internally displaced person camps.

On August 14, this year, a 7.2 magnitude quake jolted Haiti, destroying crops and livestock, levelling markets, and contaminating waterways. Indonesia is no stranger to natural calamities. At least 384 people were killed, many swept away as giant waves crashed onto beaches, when a major earthquake and tsunami hit the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in September 2018.

In August that year, a series of major quakes killed more than 500 people in the tourist island of Lombok and destroyed dozens of villages along its northern coast. The city of Palu was hit by a tsunami in 1927 and 1968.

In December 2004, a magnitude 9.15 quake off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province triggered an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed around 226,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries. Over 125,000 were killed in Indonesia alone.

Clearly, the world is getting increasingly heated and there seems to be no letup. Global warming has become the new normal, which is not a health trend at all. Unless the powerful countries do something about checking this, calamity could strike again. And the consequences could just get worse.