WATCH: Explosive footage from Ida’s landfall leaves man wondering if his building is still standing
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PORT FOURCHON, La. (NewsNation Now) — Video that shows Hurricane Ida making landfall in Louisiana Sunday has a man wondering if the Category 4 storm has destroyed his building.
A before-and-after comparison helps explains his confusion. You see the blue building on the left, 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 a Facebook post. “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.”
In Delacroix, located southeast of New Orleans, Fire Station 12 captured a video showing the storm’s effects in a one-hour period. The floodwaters, or more specifically the storm surge, came raging in during a very short period. The video switches back and forth from around 10:45 a.m. to shortly before noon when the storm made its first landfall.
Delacroix was directly in the path of some of the worst parts of Hurricane Ida.
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 more than 2 million people living in and around New Orleans and Baton Rouge under threat.
The Associated Press, Nexstar Media Wire and NewsNation affiliate KLFY contributed to this report.
