NEW ORLEANS — Entergy New Orleans, the Sewerage and Water Board, along with other city departments were grilled Monday by city council members following Hurricane Francine.
According to Entergy New Orleans, 56,000 people across Orleans parish lost power Wednesday. The energy company says there were 860 personnel ready to address power outages, but city council members are asking what preventative measures were taken.
Councilwoman Leslie Harris said, "We're getting complaints directly to us... Of hey we don't have energy now because of the storm, but we often don't in fair weather."
The councilwoman asked Entergy, "Did you all review any of those 311 complaints in preparation for the storm and address any of those complaints?" To which Entergy responded, "We definitely look at anything that could be imminent. We try and scour our New Orleans area to see what's out there and try to address those prior to the storm, we probably didn't get all of them."
Entergy New Orleans says power in the Carrollton area and Gentilly was restored last, the issue, oak trees. Councilwoman Harris is calling for power poles already in danger of collapse to be a priority ahead of severe weather.
"I know there are poles that are 45 degrees about to fall over that need to be addressed pre-storm," she said.
Entergy believes the restoration process was a success— with 99% of power restored by the end of the day on Friday.
Communication was a topic often raised, whether it was interagency communication, communication with the media, and with the public, city council unanimously said they'd like to see an improvement in communication.
Councilman At-Large JP Morell said, "A huge communications fall flat on your face issue... I think it should have been communicated very clearly we were having a sewer issue in a very concise way."
Next in the hot seat was the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, after Francine ripped through, parts of the parish flooded, and then there was a sewer issue. SWB reports the intermittent loss of 13 of the 90 pumps, the agency reported 7-9 inches of rain during the storm. SWBNO says these were not at concurrent times and the primary issue was the 6 that were affected were because of the EMD’s coming offline at around 9:15pm.
Ghassan Korban, Executive Director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans said, "That water is going to puddle, it's going to back up it's going to build, there's no way we can take all that water."
Councilman Morell says funding for the new power substation needs to be treated with urgency, saying, "That is the priority, and if that priority requires the state and city kumbaya and split the money to get it done then just get it done and anything less than that is on us."
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