Alan Chin for Insider
- Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, ripping roofs and flooding the coast.
- Within days, the storm moved to the Northeast, causing catastrophic flooding that killed dozens.
- Images from the air and space reveal extensive damage: flooded towns, power outages, and oil spills.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
After devastating the Louisiana coast, the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded the Northeast with torrential rain on Tuesday night.
Both regions have suffered major damage – fast-moving floodwaters and large tornadoes in the Northeast, and powerful winds that ripped apart buildings and knocked out power along the Gulf Coast. In Louisiana, the hurricane killed nine people. In the Northeast, at least 48 people died during the deluge.
Much of the flooding and wind damage is visible from space, and satellites captured it as they passed overhead. From helicopters and drones, meanwhile, reporters have even spotted oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.
Drag left and right on the below images to see aerial photos from before and after Hurricane Ida.
Rivers flooded streets across New Jersey
Floodwaters were still standing across New Jersey and New York the day after the deluge. The pair of images below shows how rains filled the streets of Manville, New Jersey. The nearby Raritan River swelled more than 20 feet.
A ballpark in Bridgewater, New Jersey was totally underwater after the storm.
Climate change is making many weather events more frequent and more extreme.
Hurricanes in particular are getting stronger, wetter, and more slow-moving - traits that make them much more destructive. At the same time, the Northeast is getting more extreme precipitation events, which dump huge amounts of rain on towns and cities that aren't built to handle that kind of inundation - like New Brunswick, New Jersey, pictured below.
This increase in extreme rainfall is partially because warmer air holds more moisture. The air is warmer, of course, because the burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which trap more and more of the sun's heat.
Louisiana is still reeling from floods, wind, and power outages
Hurricane Ida barreled into Louisiana as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 mph on Sunday. The winds ripped roofs away in coastal towns like La Place, pictured below.
As power lines fell and floodwaters overwhelmed the coast, about 1 million people lost electricity. Nearly all of New Orleans went dark.
Energy providers have been slowly restoring power in the New Orleans area. However, as of Friday afternoon, nearly 810,000 homes and businesses across Louisiana still didn't have electricity, according to Poweroutage.us.
Some parishes were also still flooded four days after the hurricane struck. The town of Jean Lafitte, pictured below, was inundated after water overtopped its levees.
"Ninety percent, at least, of the homes have got serious damage," mayor Timothy Kerner told Weather.com.
"If this thing would have stopped an hour earlier, then the town would have been protected," Kerner said, explaining that the town's levees held for 12 hours, but "on the 13th hour it was overtopped."
"It was just heartbreaking," he added.
Kerner described "total devastation" when speaking to local news channel WGNO.
"We've suffered bad flooding, but we've never seen water like this. It's the worst storm in our history," he said.
Oil appears to have spilled along the Gulf Coast
Ida also appears to have caused several oil spills, according The Associated Press.
An aircraft flying over the Gulf of Mexico for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday photographed what appears to be an oil slick trailing through the ocean from an oil rig.
NOAA via AP Images
The AP also identified the telltale rainbow sheen of an oil slick in its own aerial photos from the town of Lafitte.
Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
The US Coast Guard told the AP on Thursday that it was dispatching its own aircraft to investigate the reports of oil spills.