President Biden will travel to New Jersey and New York next week to survey the aftermath of Hurricane Ida after it caused severe flood damage on the east coast.
The president’s plan to visit Manville, New Jersey, and Queens, New York, on Tuesday comes after he surveyed damaged neighborhoods in Louisiana Friday to observe the storm’s impact there, particularly in suburbs surrounding New Orleans.
“My message today is….there’s nothing political about this,” Biden said Friday. “It’s just simply about saving lives and getting people back up and running. And we’re in this together. And so we’re not leaving any community behind rural, city, coastal.”
The Category 4 storm first struck Louisiana last Sunday with sustained maximum winds of 150 mph before moving north toward the tristate area on Wednesday and Thursday with severe rain, leading the governors of New York and New Jersey to issue states of emergency.
In a region that had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn’t braced for such a blow from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.
