NEW ORLEANS — A lot of people here are comparing Hurricane Ida to another big storm: Katrina. All of New Orleans is without power, that is why it is so dark here. That did not happen with Katrina.
One business owner also had a comparison to make when he went to inspect his business Monday.
It certainly was not what NOLA Auto Repair owner Joe Corona expected to see when he came to work: A collapsed cinder block wall.
“I’ve owned this building 20 years,” he said. “Even Katrina didn’t suffer damage like this.”
He just did a major remodel to his business.
“Took down the metal walls, put up of the cinder block walls, thinking that this was going to be even better for storms and everything else that we go coming our way,” Corona said.
Now he has got a major repair bill coming.
“Part of you wants to quit and part of you says, man, you got through it before, you can get through it again.”
He knows it will be difficult and expensive, but he is not willing to let Ida win.
“We got 10 families that work out here, you know, that depend on this place, so we don’t want to quit,” Corona said. “You know, we’ve been here a long time and we just got to figure out a way to get through it.”
That way, at least temporarily, is a plywood wall.
“This is just to keep my employees’ tools safe until we get a chance to come back and put a new structure up. We’ll continue to work,” Corona said. “We’ve got customers cars in the shop. We need to get them going.”
Yet, it could be a long time before New Orleans as a whole gets going again. Power is expected to be out for weeks. Even when the lights come back on, they may not always stay on
“They may have to do blackouts for a while. If demand goes really high, like if it gets hot and everybody wants to use their air conditioner at the same time, if demand in the city exceeds the supply they can bring in,” Joshua Rhodes, a power expert at University of Texas.
Rebuilding will be an even slower process without power to help power the clean-up.