Hurricane Ida battered the Big Easy over the weekend, with most of the damage coming on Sunday, ironically 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina left a path of destruction in the region. As of Tuesday, Ida had left more than a million Louisiana residents without power.

Cusimano said she, along with her husband Max and their two children, Rose, 4, and Frannie, almost 2, are thankful to be staying at her relatives’ home on Files Creek.

“We were really lucky because we got out so early,” Sam Cusimano, a 1997 graduate of Elkins High School, told The Inter-Mountain Tuesday. “On Friday morning we weren’t really sure what we were going to do, because in New Orleans you get these storm warnings all the time and half the time you evacuate (and) nothing ever happens. But later that evening we started seeing where they thought it was going to be bad, so we loaded up and took off.”

The family made their way to Tuscaloosa, Alabama on Friday night and decided to spend a couple nights at a hotel and see how the storm developed.

Sam Cusimano’s daughters Rose, 4, and Frannie, almost 2, pose for a photo with their grandmother Carol McDaniel in Beverly. Sam Cusimano’s family is currently staying with her mother and stepfather, Carol and Bill McDaniel, after evacuating from New Orleans on Friday.

“We wanted to wait and see how the storm was going to go, because if it wasn’t that bad we were just going to turn back around and go home,” Cusimano said. “But we woke up on Sunday morning and they said it was going to be a Category 5 hurricane, so we just drove on up to West Virginia to stay with my parents.”

Cusimano, whose maiden name is Daniels, owns land with her husband on Files Creek Road next to Beverly. The two are in the process of building cabins at the location that will be rented out to the public once they are complete.

Cusimano’s mother and stepfather, Carole and Bill McDaniel, also live on Files Creek, which is where she is projecting she and her family could be staying for the next several weeks.

“They are saying that it could take up to three weeks to get the power back up and running,” said Cusimano, whose home is in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans. “We are going to wait until the electricity comes back before we go home. Our biggest worry from the start was that we were going to lose electricity, especially with having two little kids. It would be terrible to be stuck in a house for days without electricity, especially with young children.”

Due to the high waters, downed trees and fallen power lines, many people remain trapped in New Orleans, despite 671 being rescued on Monday.

On Tuesday, Lousiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said, “Many of the life-supporting infrastructure elements are not present, they’re not operating right now. So if you have already evacuated, do not return here or elsewhere in southeast Louisiana until the office of emergency preparedness tells you it’s ready to receive you.”

Cusimano said some of her friends and neighbors suffered extreme property damage during the storm.

“Our house did not get any damage, but we had a bunch of oak trees in our neighborhood come down,” she said. “We had some friends that stayed and one of them that lives in the Uptown neighborhood of the city had a tree crush the porch of their house and take out the fence in their backyard. Then we have another friend who had the entire roof taken off their house. It was really scary for them.”

Cusimano said the neighborhood she lives in traditionally does not get a lot of water during hurricanes and storms, but she knows several people, including her sister-in-law, who felt the wrath of flood waters.

“Where we live is kind of on higher ground, but my sister-in-law lives in Lakeview and they got hit by the water pretty bad,” she said. “It’s pretty deep, so bad that you have to have a boat to get to her house.”

Ida, which has been downgraded from a Category 4 Hurricane to a tropical storm, saw winds of up to 150 miles per hour on Sunday when thousands of motorists were seen back-to-back on the interstates trying to evacuate.

“When we left Friday night there was no traffic,” said Cusimano. “Everyone who left Friday night got out of there easy breezy. Starting Sunday morning is when the traffic started getting really bad.”

Cusimano said most of the time people shrug off storms passing through Louisiana. She is thankful she and her husband made the decision to leave sooner rather than later.

“If you live in New Orleans you really don’t even listen to the storm warnings until they say it’s going to be really bad and you have to get out,” she said. “We just get so many hurricanes that we really don’t pay attention to it until we have to. So on Thursday night we were saying ‘oh, it’s just another storm.’ But then by Friday evening we were making plans to leave.”

Back home in Louisiana, Sam works as the director of donor relations at LSU Health Foundations. Her husband is a videographer and photographer.