Hurricane Ida chaos as cable, phone outages mount in Northeast

As remnants of Hurricane Ida flood parts of the Northeast after the Category 4 storm struck Louisiana and Mississippi with record winds, power outages led to phone and cable issues in the tristate area.

As the storm moved north midweek, the tristate area and parts of Pennsylvania experienced heavy flooding. The governors of New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency on Wednesday.

"We’re keeping our eyes on our power grid. We’ve seen about 5,300 customers without power," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a Wednesday evening tweet. "We expect the rain to stop in the next few hours. But until then, again, if you’re not inside, get inside."

As of Thursday morning, at least nine people in New York and New Jersey have died after being swept away in cars and submerged in water that flooded New York City's subways on Wednesday, according to Reuters. 

IDA HITS NORTHEAST, CAUSING WIDESPREAD FLOODING, POWER OUTAGES; AIRLINES CANCEL FLIGHTS

Power outages also hit areas of the Northeast, from New Jersey to Massachusetts, leaving tens of thousands of residences without phone service or cable.

An estimated 85,000 New York City, Long Island and New Jersey may have experienced outages, according to PIX11, citing reports from a number of local power companies. Nearly 50,000 were without power in Pennslyvania, PennLive.com reported. Additionally, more than 17,000 residences in Connecticut were without power as of Thursday morning, according to the CTPost. 

DownDetector.com, a website that tracks website and network outages, indicated that Optimum cable customers were experiencing outages in New York on Wednesday evening into Thursday morning. New York's MTA website, Verizon, Xfinity, AT&T, Cox and T-Mobile customers also reported widespread outages between Wednesday and Thursday, largely in parts of the Northeast and in Louisiana.

TOTAL DAMAGE AND ECONOMIC LOSS FROM HURRICANE IDA WILL FALL BETWEEN $70B AND $80B: ACCUWEATHER EXPERT

Ida made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday morning as a Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, leaving about a million residences and businesses without power across the southeastern part of the state and in Mississippi after winds slammed an electrical grid and toppled a major transmission tower, knocking out thousands of miles of lines and hundreds of substations.

"Hurricane Ida has devastated so many of the communities we call home," Rod West, group president of utility operations for power company Entergy Corporation, said in a Thursday statement. "The next days and weeks will be difficult for our region, but Entergy and our employees are here to lead the recovery. We will not stop until the last light is on."

At least four deaths in Louisiana and Mississippi have occurred in connection to the hurricane; authorities have rescued hundreds of others in suburbs outside of New Orleans that experienced major flooding.

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More than 21,000 workers form 38 states were deployed to Louisiana and Mississippi to help restore power to neighborhoods, according to Entergy, which said on Thursday that it had restored power to more than 107,000 customers. 

With water treatment plants overwhelmed by floodwaters or crippled by power outages, some places were also facing shortages of drinking water. About 441,000 people in 17 parishes had no water, and an additional 319,000 were under boil-water advisories, federal officials said.

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In New Orleans, drivers lined up for roughly a quarter-mile, waiting to get into a Costco that was one of the few spots in the city with gasoline. At other gas stations, motorists occasionally pulled up to the pumps, saw the handles covered in plastic bags and drove off.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.