New Orleans, United States – Hurricane Ida was not Michael Corolla’s first storm.
As a young merchant seaman, he weathered three separate hurricanes in the open ocean, riding supertankers up the crests of 15 metre (50ft) waves in the middle of the North Atlantic. So as Hurricane Ida barreled towards New Orleans on August 29 last year, he figured he and his wife of 57 years, Charmayne, would be safe at Boyd Manor, the low-income senior centre where they lived on the ground floor. They had moved into the three-storey apartment building, close to the Mississippi River, about a year earlier. This would be their first serious hurricane at Boyd.
