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It is the toughest test yet for the hundreds of miles of new levees built around New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall 16 years ago to the day, inundating historically Black neighborhoods and killing more than 1,800 people.
For having me. yes, we have issued, if you notice our parish is 65 miles long from the top and to the foot and venice, louisiana, that goes right into the gulf. if you look at louisiana at the boot, we're at the end of the boot. we are out there in no man's land, if you want to say. but we have issued evacuation order on friday at 3:00 p.m. we upped it a little bit further up north on saturday. and now we have seen a good deal of people heed our warning and move on. and we, you know, encourage our people if they have opportunity to get out to get out. the window's closing now. i'm on right now...
Prepared to be without power for days on weeks. >> what are you hearing from other people in your community who stayed? how concerned are people right now where you are? >> well, where i'm located, it's what's called the hista system. it's a 100-year levee protection that the corps has done some updates. those are some flood gates that we have closed. we have closed off some of the sections of our levee on our highway. so we ordered a mandatory evacuation on friday, and then we increased that mandatory evacuation on saturday, moving it up north. so we thought we were pretty successful in getti...
Arrives. joining me now is the president of plaquemines parish, kirk lepine. kirk, let's get right to it. the national weather service is reporting the water has gone over at least one levee. what can you tell us about that? >> yes. we are separated by the mississippi river, so we have an east bank and a west bank of our parish. our parish is 58 miles long from the tip of the top to the bottom. we're the parish that sticks out in the gulf of mexico where if you look at the boot of louisiana, we're that last parish that sticks out. and on the east bank of our parish, there has been some overtop...
Doing and what it's like where you are. oh, goodness. do we not have the phone hook up for ali? okay. we're going to hook that up. he may be, you know, with storms. there's always difficulty with the cell service certainly. we're going to go back to ali in just a moment. let's talk about hurricane ida barreling towards the gulf coast and making landfall in just hours from now. you have the residents of plaquemanes parish. joining me now is the president kirk lepine. let's talk about where things stand with your residents and how many have heeded warnings to evacuate. were those mandatory warni...