New Orleans bolsters ‘anti-looting plan’ with citywide CURFEW, as nearly 1mn state residents remain without power after hurricane

The city of New Orleans has been placed under a curfew, forcing residents to remain home during the night hours indefinitely, as authorities try to prevent looting after a devastating hurricane knocked out power across Louisiana.

Effective immediately, the 8pm curfew was announced by New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Tuesday afternoon, and is set to continue “until terminated” by the city administration at a yet unspecified date. The curfew order makes exceptions for “emergency and relief works [sic],” and extends until 6am each morning.

During a Tuesday press conference, Cantrell defended her decision to deploy “anti-looting teams” across the city in an effort to stem a series of thefts and break-ins that followed Hurricane Ida, which made landfall on Sunday and wreaked destruction across the Gulf coast. The mayor said the anti-looting initiative, done in conjunction with the state National Guard, had been “effective” so far, but would nonetheless be expanded with additional personnel. 

“I spoke this morning about our anti-looting plan that has been in place, and it has been effective. But also I discussed that we will be ramping up additional capacity… from a proactive standpoint. That is with the Louisiana National Guard as well,” Cantrell told reporters.

Just shy of one million Louisiana residents remain without power after the category 4 hurricane virtually destroyed the state’s power infrastructure, while some 177,000 in Orleans parish are still in darkness, according to outage tracker PowerOutage.us. At least four people were killed due to the storm, including two in Louisiana and two in Mississippi.

After several days of massive electricity shortages, the Joe Biden administration announced late on Tuesday that it would assist with restoring power in the affected states, noting that the president, along with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, had been in touch with local utility companies.

“To assist with power restoration efforts, the Federal Government is sharing aerial and satellite imagery to support damage assessments [and] helping with debris removal and traffic control so restoration workers and equipment can get access to downed wires and poles,” the White House said, adding that Biden “committed the full weight” of federal agencies to resolving the problem.

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