PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Hurricane Ida is expected to slam into the Gulf Coast with winds up to 150 miles per hour this weekend. In a bitter irony, the powerful storm will make landfall in Louisiana on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.
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Former KYW Newsradio Suburban Bureau Chief Brad Segall was in New Orleans that day to take his son to college when Katrina made landfall. Unexpectedly for him, but serendipitously for KYW and its listeners, Segall covered the storm live.
Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane, hitting Louisiana with 125 mph winds. Fortunately, Segall told KYW Newsradio Sunday, the storm arrived west of New Orleans, sparing the city from a direct hit.
Nonetheless, he remembered a frightening time as he and others were ushered into a hotel ballroom to wait for the storm to pass.
"Of course, the power went out. We spent most of that Sunday in that ballroom. And then later in the day on Sunday, when the storm actually blew through, we had gone outside, we had actually been able to go out onto Canal Street in the French Quarter, walk around a little bit," he said.
"There was a lot of damage, but the sun had come out ... Little did we know at that time that the levee system had breached in New Orleans," he continued.
"By the time we woke up Monday morning, we looked outside our hotel room and we had ... 5 to 10 feet of water in the French Quarter where we were, surrounding our hotel. And at that point, we found out that, I think, about 80% of New Orleans was underwater."
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Unfortunately for Segall, he learned he would be staying in New Orleans longer than planned. That Monday, he learned, they were unable to get out of the hotel, and necessities were very limited.
"They did have supplies, they did have water, they did have some food. But the people who worked at the hotel had brought their families down there as well. And very quickly, we were out of water, out of food. You couldn't take a shower," he said. "We had no running water, you couldn't use the bathrooms."
The lack of water was especially noticeable given the 90-degree heat and 90% humidity, Segall recalled, and it forced them to take extreme measures to keep clean.
"I remember very distinctly in my mind that when we were going in to eat what little food there was, we had to dip our hands into bleach in a tub in order to clean our hands," he said. "So we had to worry about the effects of not having clean hands to be able to eat food and the sickness, the public health issue that would have gone through the hotel."
Segall also recalled seeing the unrest in the city from his hotel. "We saw the looting outside, we saw the fires outside. We had New Orleans police for a little while in our hotel guarding us with with guns to make sure the looters didn't come into the hotel," he said.
By late Thursday of that week, Segall and others were able to leave the hotel. They were transported to Baton Rouge, where they boarded a flight to Dallas. He was back in Philadelphia by Friday.
Of course, that wasn't the end of the story for New Orleans residents. Hundreds lost their lives during the Category 3 Katrina. Many others were displaced to cities such as Houston and Dallas. The National Hurricane Service has designated Ida a Category 4 hurricane, warning, "Ida is expected to be an extremely dangerous major hurricane when it makes landfall along the Louisiana coast."
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