Residents in southern Louisiana braced for weeks without electrical power and disruption to their water systems in the wake of Hurricane Ida, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. By early Tuesday, about 1.3 million customers in the region were without power about 48 hours after the storm made landfall, most of them in Louisiana, according to PowerOutage , which gathers data from U.S. utility companies. The storm killed at least two people in the state, officials said, a death toll that may have been much larger if not for a fortified levee system around New Orleans, which had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina 16 years earlier. ( Graphic of Hurricane Ida hitting Gulf Coast ) Entergy Corp (ETR.N) , a major power supplier in the region, said it could take weeks before electricity is restored in […]