When the winds began to howl on Tuesday night, Juanita Carruth was home with her daughters in New Orleans East.
She worried for her husband, who was driving back from the North Shore through the treacherous weather. When the tornado warning came, urging New Orleanians to shelter in their basements — which few people have — she and her girls hunkered down in their bathtub, with a mattress over their heads.
The tornado that passed over their neighborhood had just ripped through Arabi before crossing the parish line to get to the East. It wasn't the first time she'd experienced a twister.
“It was scary. I cried,” Carruth said on Wednesday. “I cried because this was traumatizing, and it traumatized me and my neighbors all over again.”
When a tornado swept through New Orleans East five years ago, Carruth had to replace her roof and all her windows. Those held up this time, but the pillars holding up the front of her house were knocked down by the storm’s winds on Tuesday.
Her shed blew away; she had no idea where it went. The contents of it still sat in her backyard.
“It’s gonna cost a couple of thousands to get fixed, for sure,” she said.
The brunt of Tuesday’s tornado was felt in Arabi, where the storm’s 160 mph winds lifted homes and resulted in one death in St. Bernard Parish. No injuries or deaths have been reported in Orleans Parish, but the tornado carved a tight path through this pocket of the East, near the intersection of Prentiss Avenue and Coronado Drive.
At a press conference midday Wednesday, Collin Arnold, director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said 50 structures in the area had some form of damage. Most had just missing shingles or damaged siding, but five to six properties had more moderate to major roof damage, based on that morning’s assessments.
On Wednesday afternoon, neighbors gathered debris — shingles, fence posts, backyard slides — into neat piles on the curb. Entergy trucks snaked through the suburban streets.
Carruth wasn’t sure when she’d get power back, though. The tornado severed her home’s connection to the grid, making her one of nearly 1,900 residents in New Orleans East who didn’t have power as of Wednesday. She would need an electrician and an insurance agent to come assess the damage, she said.
“I can’t do anything yet, because this is electricity and if it gets put on, it could catch fire,” she said.
The lack of electricity is a particular concern because she runs a nonprofit, Families Against Child Trafficking, from her home. She may have to rev up her generator, which she used when Hurricane Ida plunged the East and much of south Louisiana into the dark for weeks just last August. Her home was spared then, though.
A block away, John Green hadn’t fared well after Ida — like many New Orleanians, he lost food from his freezer and was stuck inside in the heat. Tuesday’s tornado hadn’t been kind to him either.
The wind pushed his refrigerator into his kitchen cabinets, and blew out a picture window looking onto the street. By Wednesday afternoon, volunteers had come to patch it with plywood and were checking out his roof.
Then it was time to wait for the lights to come back on — just like after Ida.
“We’re survivors though,” Green said from his wheelchair, outside his home. “We’re used to this.”
As of Thursday afternoon, power has been restored to the majority of customers in New Orleans East, according to Entergy’s outage maps.
Carruth said she’s grateful everyone is safe. But all of the severe weather of the last few years has taken its toll on her and so many others in south Louisiana.
“My heart and prayers go out to all the victims over in Arabi and across the state,” she said. “Because we've been through it.”
