Hurricane Ida soaks downtown New Orleans

New Orleans is seeing strong gusts of wind and rainfall as Hurricane Ida approaches the downtown area.

Ida blasted ashore along the Louisiana coast on Sunday, with the eye of one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S. arriving near the barrier island of Grand Isle.

Ida made landfall south of New Orleans on Sunday as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with winds of 150 mph (230 kph), one of the most powerful storms ever to strike the U.S.

The arrival of Ida came 16 years to the day after Katrina devastated New Orleans.

More than 100,000 customers had lost power in Louisiana by noon and were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.US, which tracks outages nationwide.