NEW ORLEANS (WGNO)— A new initiative to turn neighborhood restaurants into resilience hubs after disasters like Hurricane Ida hopes to prepare neighborhoods for long term power outages.
District A Councilman Joe Giarusso stated, “I feel like 5 years ago we were saying how do we live with water, now I think we talk about how do we live with storms.”
To that end, the initiative called Get Lit Stay Lit aims to get solar panels and storage batteries in centralized locations to help recover from those storms.
The nonprofit Feed the Second Line teamed with several partners to produce the effort.
Founder Devin DeWulf said, “In our city we have to go neighborhood by neighborhood, and build little hubs like this restaurant where people can have a phone charging station, get a hot meal, have a cooling center.”
Another angle of the effort is that of training a workforce of the culture community to do the work.
Today’s ribbon-cutting was at Queen Trini Lisa, a neighborhood restaurant who’s owner is on-board with wanting to help those around her.