Original subtitles

Tractor trailer right here!

This morning, ahead of Hurricane Ida,

it is an absolute ghost town on Bourbon Street.

This is the French Quarter.

So the hope is

that these buildings will be able to survive

what could be the worst hurricane

ever to make landfall

in the state of Louisiana.

I'm Jonathan Petramala

and I'm a documentarian journalist for 20 years.

I focus on extreme weather.

Hurricane Ida is heading towards New Orleans,

part of the country that I have a huge place

in my heart for,

and it makes you hurt because you know

that that place that you love

is not going to be the same the day after.

My partner, Brandon and I get there beforehand

to document what's happening.

We are west of the storm.

We have ominous news coming from the hurricane hunters

as they continue to track Hurricane Ida.

It is strengthening.

It has sustained winds

at 150 miles per hour.

As a journalist,

you don't wanna scare anybody.

But we have seen what can happen

with Hurricane Katrina.

And you have a hurricane stronger than Katrina

heading for that same spot.

It's terrifying.

I was born in New Orleans.

And since Katrina, you know, we kind of learned

to just ride storms out.

My kids and my wife, we stayed in New Orleans.

Look what I do. Let's go now.

That morning, kids kind of was running around, still playing.

And then you see people making last preparations.

You see people boarding up their houses

and, you know, starting to get a little quiet.

You know, it started to get a little dark,

the sky started to get a little dark.

You can feel the wind blowing.

But we figured, "Hey, this storm can't be a Katrina."

All right. Now, we just got the 11:00 a.m. update.

Landfall will probably happen a little bit before noon

with a Category 4, 185 mile per hour winds.

Those 185 mile per hour winds are gonna be right in here.

And that is gonna just hammer Port Fourchon and Grand Isle.

It was the morning of the storm.

We were watching our local news.

And we would just slowly watch it

getting closer and closer

and closer to us.

Once the power was out, we were just left in the dark.

Things started slowly intensifying.

And I had my Nikon cameras, so I just was like,

"Man, I'll just take a couple of videos

to show people what these storms are about."

We made the last minute decision to stay.

It was just a... It was a split second decision.

We weren't prepared for it.

But of course we thought we were,

but you really can't prepare for something like that.

Oh, no. That can't be good.

The storm kept getting stronger and stronger.

If this house falls down, I'm gonna get hurt for sure.

All you could do is just really hunker down

and just pray for the best, you know?

Oh, my God.

The hurricane is making its way

from the coast up towards where we are in New Orleans.

I already see the outer band's here.

Hurricane Ida,

these clouds are moving around in that cyclonic action,

might be one of the worst days in history

for Louisiana or New Orleans.

We're constantly scanning through radar

as well as satellite because these storms

make little adjustments on their path.

Oh, oh.

Oh.

Hurricane Ida is a major hurricane

and it's heading right towards the biggest population center

in the State of Louisiana.

Because New Orleans is essentially in a bowl,

the most dangerous part of a hurricane

is not the wind, it's the water.

So this is the storm reduction system behind me.

You can see the floodgate blocking the highway.

This is Highway 90 and you can see what's ahead of me,

the storm surge, just the beginning of it.

This is what these levees were rebuilt for.

Hurricane Ida is gonna be the first real test

this has had since they were rebuilt after Katrina.

Possibility of 15 to 20 inches of rain

in New Orleans, your concerns about that?

We are seeing life-threatening flash flooding

from this intense rainfall,

life-threatening storm surges.

My partner, Brandon and I,

we wanna go closer

to where the core of the storm is.

We know we are driving into danger.

It's kind of like an apocalyptic movie.

That water was really high.

So I was fully expecting

to come across a corpse in that car.

It's the most scared I've ever been in a hurricane

because I don't know what I'm going to see.

I don't know what I'm gonna come across.

Am I going to be physically in danger

by this water myself?

Then I look over to my left and I see

more cars and more people

and I know more people are in trouble.

These people were trapped and the hurricane

still blowing, the water still rising.

We got them around the deep water.

We were able to give them a little bit of shelter from the wind.

We called 911.

And so we're doing all we can

to get them out of this wind,

out of this rain, out of this dangerous situation.

We planned on hunkering down.

We didn't plan on leaving at all.

You know, half the building had came down,

and so of course, the wife and kids wanted to leave.

The storm was still going on.

Now, the winds are still at probably

about 100 miles an hour, gusts,

you know, the roads flooded.

We get to that underpass.

And we couldn't go any further on I-10.

I heard people screaming,

people saying, "Help, help, help, help."

I just took my shoes off and I just took off

running out on the highway to see who needed help.

I look up and I notice

the man was unconscious

and so, hey,

you got to try to save his life.

I'm explaining to 911,

"Hey, man, you guys gotta get some help out here."

It was bad.

It didn't matter what I had to do.

I wanted to save him.

I noticed the gentleman laying in the center of I-10.

I ran over,

started doing CPR on him.

Some other people came.

They helped.

I was on the phone with 911,

and I was trying to give them the location.

They sent one guy out in an ambulance.

He checked his pulse.

I wanted him to live.

I wanted him to be alive.

I went in my van and got a white sheet

and covered him up with a white sheet,

said a prayer over him.

And so I sat out there with them.

I can just see the sheet just...

Finding James that night,

I got this real sad, eerie feeling.

I think about him every day, every day.

That was a scary night.

New Orleans is not the same.

You're seeing this beautiful city torn to shreds.

It was like the entire place was a water world.

Southeast Louisiana is composed of swamps

and wetlands, and it's also saturated

from heavy repetitive rain.

That gave Ida its energy source that allowed it

to maintain its structure and its power.

We started seeing reports from New Orleans,

and it was just devastating,

the destruction that we saw there.

As the hurricane was making its way up

through Mississippi, people in Louisiana were left

picking up the pieces

and desperately searching for survivors.

And in New Orleans, they have a pumping system

and the flood protection walls.

Unfortunately, the entire coast of Louisiana

doesn't have the levee protection system

like New Orleans does.

I was born and raised in Lafitte, Louisiana.

My community raised me.

The bayous raised me,

the marshes, the swamps.

When a hurricane comes, we all work together.

Me and my buddy Evan, we had one mission, go in,

help our neighbors, help whoever we can.

There's an elderly woman, Ms. Emily,

who's on oxygen and they haven't heard

from her since yesterday.

Her daughter reached out to me.

It all happened so fast.

When I've seen where she was located,

I knew it was gonna be bad

because that's where it hit the worst at.

Lord, please let her have found a way out,

because if she's in this house, it ain't good.

We decided to get out the house

and go talk to the neighbor.

We're looking for Ms. Emily.

Looking and I guess about 15 minutes goes by,

felt like a lifetime.

It's like she never left. She's in there.

We gotta find her.

I was afraid of what we might find, you know.

We flipped every piece of furniture over

and really tear this house apart.

And my buddy Evan, when he looked down,

she was right down between, like,

the kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator.

She had unfortunately passed away.

We just felt like what if we could've got there

a little bit sooner?

I instantly thought of how it might have been

for her in those last few moments.

She was just such an amazing person

that she tried to help out anybody

and everybody she could.

I just want my mom back.

And I'm sorry she had to suffer.

But then I told my buddy, you know, we gotta go back.

And then we went and get her dogs

and brought them to a relative,

a family member of Ms. Emily.

We couldn't make it in time for Ms. Emily but being able

to get those dogs back to her family was a good feeling.

That's just what we do down there.

We help each other.

Two days after Ida made landfall

and we're still tracking it as it's heading our way.

As Ida made its way over Mississippi and West Virginia,

it started to lose some of its strength.

But then things start to change.

You've got this hot storm

coming from the Caribbean

colliding with a cold front from Canada

and it really turns into a completely different animal.

What was even scarier was that this storm

was now headed on up to Pennsylvania,

New Jersey, and New York.

Impact in 14.0--

This has now created a storm that is much more powerful.

What that's going to mean is torrential downpours

of flooding, even tornadoes.

Where we are in South Jersey,

there's no thought to, well, there's gonna be something

really big coming through, 'cause this is South Jersey.

Nothing usually happens

in South Jersey.

We got into the basement with less than 10 seconds to spare.

I didn't really grasp what was going on until we went down,

and within seconds later,

we heard the freight train come through.

The most ominous sound you could ever imagine.

This is a terrifying situation

for people in New Jersey.

This is not just any tornado.

This is EF3 with wind speeds

of up to 150 miles an hour.

When we were in the basement,

we could hear the tornado hitting our house.

It was just this sickening, crunching, ripping sound.

And then there was complete silence.

I come up the steps and I look,

and we looked up and all we saw was the sky.

And I just kinda sat on the foyer floor

and I started to cry 'cause I couldn't believe

what my eyes were seeing.

When we walked outside, it was like a warzone.

There were just debris everywhere.

You do realize that was probably not very survivable.

Very shortly after Ida hits New Jersey,

it's classified as one of the deadliest weather disasters

in the state's history

with several fatalities already reported.

In Cranford, just like some of the other towns around it,

residents there are being taken by surprise

by the rapid flash flooding.

I live with my husband and my four boys.

We went to bed around 11:30,

and around 2:30 in the morning,

my son came running in and told me

that water was coming through the basement window.

The water was just pushing through and my two boys

have their bedrooms down there,

so we just tried to pick things up off the floor.

And then by 4:00 is when everything changed.

Mom! Mom!

Mom! Mom!

Mom!

Mom! Mom!

We heard the wall and the foundation just break.

Mom!

Mom! Mom!

All I could hear was the crashing of the water

and screaming.

My son was just yelling.

Mom! Mom!

I was in the utility room.

When I opened my eyes, I had about four inches to breathe.

That's how high the water was to the ceiling.

Me and my son, Joel, were trapped down there.

And I can't swim.

I definitely thought I was going to die.

My husband decided he would go outside

so that maybe he could pull us out through one of the windows.

Joel had to like swim a little bit

and then he eventually did pull him out.

My husband then went to go look for me.

He grabbed me by my arms and just slid me out

onto the ground,

and he just held me.

I said, "I can't believe you saved me."

And my son looks over, my second son, Mateo,

and he looks at me and he says,

"Mom, you're alive?" And I said, "Yes."

And the four of us just hugged each other.

In that moment, the firemen pulled up

in like a raft and took us away.

We're starting to get reports that people

living in these densely populated areas

in river or floodplains

are in grave danger.

Some towns are seeing

10 inches of rain in just a few hours.

I was a retail pharmacist.

And even with the storm approaching,

it wasn't even on my mind 'cause I was so focused

on what I had to do at work.

I lived in Rahway, New Jersey with my wife Nirali.

And we just had a newborn called Anjeli.

My wife and child were at home at that time.

My wife had called and said that

the water was approaching our steps.

My wife did send me a few videos.

And then one of the videos she had sent was our basement.

As the hours progressed,

my sump pumps... I have two sump pumps

and a French drain and all the things

to stop flooding coming into my home,

those all started to break one by one.

Some pipe or some line must have gotten loose

from one of the walls and leaked

and caused the gas to fill up our home.

There was water coming out from the windows

of the basement.

And around that time

is when I made the decision

to leave because it was just too much.

Leaving at that moment felt dangerous.

Never in a million years

would I have expected

what happened to my home.

19. Yeah, I'm on foot.

Yeah, I'll keep calling for help.

It was my day off

but I knew it in my heart that no matter what,

I was gonna go to work because I know

I could be a help to maybe one person.

Yes.

You could tell she was like

really struggling to hold on.

I heard the fire trucks come.

They sent swift water rescue guys.

They get her across safely.

That was my sigh of relief.

If we didn't go try and help her,

she could have died.

It's just very emotional.

When I left after grabbing everything

and putting it into the cars,

I really did think I made the wrong decision.

I thought that I was being a baby

and I thought that I could have handled this, you know?

It was one of those moments

where you wake up and you're like,

"Wow, I'm so thankful."

I'm in New York and, basically, it's like

a tsunami hitting the city.

The National Weather Service office in New York declared

its first-ever flash flood emergency.

Oh. Oh, God.

We were dispatched to a neighborhood in Queens

where there were reports of basements flooding.

Officers are called to a flooded basement

apartment in Queens where they tried

to rescue a young couple and their two-year-old son.

Unfortunately, the family didn't make it.

I remember interviewing a woman

who was in her apartment, in her basement apartment,

the water is rushing in, flooding down the stairs.

She's screaming for help.

She finally gets a neighbor's attention.

I remember talking to her a couple of hours

after that rescue and she was just in tears.

We have lost a son.

We have lost a sister.

This is... Yeah, we... I cannot comprehend.

No one... The emotions here.

I can't speak for everyone.

There is only sadness,

and it's just overwhelming.

I've never seen anything like that when we got there

and saw the sheer terror that these people felt

in the final moments of their lives.

It is something that will stick with me

for the rest of my life.

Hurricane Ida was the most scared I've ever been in a hurricane.

And I just did the best I could.

Hurricane Ida cost lives of folks all the way

from Louisiana into New Jersey.

Lives and families that are gonna be impacted

for generations because of what one storm caused.

I think about what would have happened

if we stayed a lot.

I don't think I would be here.

I'm so thankful my daughter is able to see another day.

Those are moments where I'm like...

I'm just grateful.

There really was nothing salvageable from the home.

Everything material is lost.

But...

I didn't lose my family that day.

I was just so thankful that we were all okay.

It really makes you understand

and appreciate everything you have

and realize that the little things, they don't matter.

That night was life-changing

for me and for my family.

I ended up moving to Galveston, Texas.

And now I have my own church.

Galveston is hurricane-prone, you know,

and so I've already told my wife,

I said, "I'm not leaving.

If a hurricane come, I'mma stay here

and I'm gonna help people. You guys go,

but I'm gonna stay here. That's my mission."