At least one person is dead as Hurricane Ida moves inland along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, officials said Sunday night.

The Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office said it received reports shortly after 8:30 p.m. CDT of a person injured from a fallen tree in Prairieville, Louisiana, about 18 minutes southeast of Baton Rouge. Deputies arrived and confirmed the victim’s death, the APSO said in a statement on Facebook. It’s the first death reported from the storm.
Ida made landfall earlier Sunday — on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — as a dangerous Category 4 hurricane with winds of 150 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. As of 10 p.m. ET, Ida was a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph, and its center was about 25 miles west-southwest of New Orleans. It was moving northwest at about 10 mph.
More than 968,000 customers in Louisiana and Mississippi are without power, according to PowerOutage.US.
Entergy New Orleans sent out an alert Sunday evening saying the entire Orleans Parish was without power “due to catastrophic transmission damage.” According to city officials, the only power in New Orleans at this time is coming from generators.
The outage was caused by “a load imbalance to the company’s transmission and generation,” Entergy said on Twitter Sunday night.
The power outage was hindering the operation of sewer pumping stations.
“Currently there is no backup power to operate any of those that were impacted,” the Sewage and Water Board of New Orleans said. “We are assessing how many of the 84 stations are impacted but the number may be very significant.”
“In order to prevent sewage backups, we have asked residents to limit water usage at home, thus decreasing the amount of wastewater we must pump and treat,” the statement read.
In Lafourche Parish, Sheriff Craig Webre said every road in the parish is impassable, and agencies are unable to respond to calls for service at this time. There is a curfew already in place for the parish, “and we’re going to set up checkpoints to aggressively enforce that curfew,” the sheriff said.
Officials plan to canvass the parish with every available county employee in the morning, but with the lack of electricity, downed power lines, and scattered debris, Webre doesn’t anticipate any opportunities to clear roadways Sunday night that would allow any travel prior to daybreak.
Archie Chaisson III, Lafourche Parish president, said in a news conference that parts of the parish will be without water “for some part of the forseeable future” after a water main line break.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards requested a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden as his state continues to be pummeled by Hurricane Ida, his office said. Biden has already signed emergency declarations for Louisiana and Mississippi.

“Hurricane Ida is one of the strongest storms to ever hit Louisiana,” the governor’s release said. “It is our goal to assist our local agencies and the citizens of the state as quickly as possible, and we have pre-positioned search and rescue teams, boats and other assets to begin helping people as soon as it is safe.”
Ida is now tied with Hurricane Laura from last year and the Last Island Hurricane of 1856 as the state’s most powerful storm ever.
The Louisiana Department of Transportation shut down about 22 miles of Interstate 10 because of fallen trees on the roadway. I-10 is a major thoroughfare connecting the eastern part of the state to the west.
St. Bernard Parish president Guy McInnis told Sunday evening that he has reports of 22 barges that have broken loose in the hurricane.
McInnis says he’s not worried about the barges hitting a levee and damaging it, but he is worried that they may hit other infrastructure in the parish.

Edwards urged residents to remain indoors and to be patient, as the state does not know how soon first responders will be able to respond to calls for assistance.
“Once the storm has passed, you need to be prepared to shelter in place for the first 72 hours,” Edwards said. “We have every possible resource ready to go, to help you. We’ll get there sooner than 72 hours if at all possible, in order to rescue people across the state of Louisiana.”

By Sunday evening, Hurricane Ida had left more than 930,000 customers without power in Louisiana, according to poweroutage.us. And Energy Louisiana said some of its customers could be without power for weeks.
The storm’s outer bands also have knocked out power to nearly 15,000 customers in Mississippi, the outage website said.