KENNER, La. — After the worst of Hurricane Francine had passed, Jamie Whipple walked through knee-deep water in front of her Kenner home. She immediately knew something was wrong.
“I have a drain in front of my house,” Whipple said. “Me and my neighbors were cleaning, but nothing was moving. And it stayed up to my knees for hours.”
Her son Nick, even closer to the overtopped Duncan Canal along Kenner’s western border, had that amount of water inside his house.
“It was heartbreaking for him,” Whipple said. “They just moved in and just got new furniture.”
Whipple's assumption turned out to be right. In addition to record rainfall – more than nine inches in spots – the Kenner flooding was made worse when three out of four pumps at the airport went out, in addition to breakdowns of two Jefferson Parish pumps.
Parish officials say the malfunctions occurred at the worst possible time.
As Kenner Mayor Michael Glaser put it, “They had some hiccups in the mechanical system and Mother Nature never stops.”
Glaser said that the failures left his city taking on water that overtopped the parish’s drainage canals.
“The airport pumps to the west into the LaBranche Wetlands,” Glaser said. “When they're not functioning, it's all concrete at the airport, we get the runoff in our drainage canals.”
Whipple thinks officials could have done more.
“They knew the floods were coming, the water was coming,” she said. “If they would have had a generator out there when the pumps went down maybe that would have helped them come back up.”
Glaser agrees that more redundancies are needed at the pumping stations.
“We need to try to change something so that if they go out, there's another system that can come on,” he said. “You want no house ever to flood. That's pretty much the basics of government services. People pay taxes.”
In a statement, an airport spokeswoman said officials are “conducting a thorough investigation to determine the root cause of the issues at the pump station so they can be properly addressed.”
Jefferson Parish officials said they are doing the same thing with their pump failures. A preliminary review showed that the station's four diesel-powered pumps worked, but the two pumps powered by the electrical grid went out.
To ease the strain on the parish’s drainage system, Glaser said hopes to accelerate the construction of two new pumping stations already in the design stage.
One of those drainage pump stations is being built by Jefferson Parish in the northwest corner of the municipality. That station will bypass the parish’s man-made canals and pump water directly into the LaBranche Wetlands.
The other, funded by the City of Kenner, will be located close to City Hall on the city’s southern edge and pump water directly into the Mississippi River, also bypassing the canals.
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