New Orleans-area tornado: crews comb through devastated neighborhoods after twister kills 1, leaves thousands without power
A preliminary EF-3 tornado tore a roughly two-mile path through St. Bernard Parish's Arabi neighborhood, killing one person and injuring several others as a second, weaker tornado hit St. Tammany Parish the same night.
A tornado tore through the New Orleans area on the evening of Tuesday, March 22, 2022, killing one person and leaving thousands of homes and businesses without power, according to coverage from CNN, WREX and Local 3 News. The tornado struck just before 8 p.m., beginning its path in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward before hitting hardest in the Arabi neighborhood of St. Bernard Parish, just outside the city, and also touching New Orleans East.
Reporting on the number injured varied slightly by outlet: CNN-sourced coverage put the figure at eight people hospitalized, while a separate report citing local officials said seven people were treated for minor injuries. More than 10,000 customers lost power across Orleans and St. Bernard parishes Tuesday night; that figure fell to just over 2,800 by Wednesday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us data cited in one report, while another outlet put Wednesday-morning outages at just over 5,000 — figures that likely reflect different snapshots in an actively improving restoration effort rather than a genuine conflict.
The National Weather Service preliminarily rated the tornado an EF-3, with winds of at least 136 mph, and noted it could be upgraded to a low-end EF-4 pending further survey. NWS survey teams were deployed to assess damage across the affected communities, according to the reporting.
The scale of the damage
St. Bernard Parish President Guy McInnis described roughly a two-mile stretch of destruction, saying, "It's about a 2-mile stretch (of damage)...It was a miracle that more people weren't killed or hurt." Houses collapsed or were pulled from their foundations, roofs were torn off, windows were blown out, and vehicles were overturned; a school bus was thrown about 100 yards from where it had been parked. Streets were littered with debris, wood, metal and downed power lines. Roughly 50 structures were damaged in New Orleans East as well. Arabi Elementary School closed Wednesday because of the damage, though the rest of St. Bernard Parish's schools operated on a normal schedule, per the reporting.
A parish already marked by Katrina
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards toured the damage and invoked St. Bernard Parish's history, saying, "This parish lost more population after Katrina than any other parish in the state...they are resilient and wonderful people." McInnis echoed that framing of a community accustomed to storm recovery: "We've been through this...like a gazillion times, but we are good at it," he said, according to the reporting. Emergency workers searched every affected home in the parish in the hours after the twister.
More than one storm that night
A separate, weaker EF-1 tornado with winds around 90 mph tracked roughly 12.2 miles through Lacombe in St. Tammany Parish the same night, damaging trees, destroying a shed and causing minor roof damage, the reporting noted. A possible additional tornado touched down in Jefferson Parish without reported injuries or major damage, underscoring that the March 22 severe weather event produced multiple twisters across the region rather than a single storm.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by CNN, WREX and Local 3 News. It restores a story originally published on this site in March 2022; figures are as reported at the time.