NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — After being called to council chambers, the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans is taking accountability for a lack a communication during this past weekend’s rain event.
A turbine failed Saturday while another one was already down, worsening the street flooding.
The New Orleans City Council wanted to know why a notification wasn’t sent out to the public and what’s going to change moving forward.
SWBNO officials once again said they were prepared for Saturday’s rain, but the amount of rain the city received in a five-hour window caused Turbine No. 4 to go offline.
However, they did admit, with a fragile system, overpreparing is the solution and reassured the council that communication with the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness would improve.
Councilman Joe Giarrusso said, “In my mind, what needs to happen is knowing that the power is going to fail, it is going to fail more likely than not, then what are we doing when rain intensifies to give people as much notice as humanly possible?”
“We’re going to change our approach,” SWBNO Interim General Superintendent Ron Spooner said. “We’re going to be conservative, and it may become a pain, somewhat, if you keep doing that, but that’s where we are until we get to a stable state.”
NOHSEP Director Collin Arnold admits while looking at data from the National Weather Service, he was more concerned about a tornado, not continued rainfall, and when he recognized flash flooding was in effect, it was too late to send out an alert to notify drivers they can move their vehicles atop the neutral ground.
Arnold says his department will lift neutral ground parking restrictions more frequently and increase the number of times alerts are sent out.
As for the Sewerage and Water Board, in the short-term, the department is creating a power and pump online dashboard that will show real-time updates if pumping stations are on, ready, or out of order.
In the long term, the Sewerage and Water Board is in the process of building their West Power Complex with phase two of the project, a back-up power plant, expected to be completed in the summer of 2025.
During Wednesday’s committee meeting, Giarrusso questioned whether the council should allocate available funding as soon as possible to expedite completion of the power complex.
SWNO Executive Director Ghassan Korban responded that his team would have to look into it but that an earlier completion date seems probable.
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