NEW ORLEANS — The amount of rain that fell on the city of New Orleans Saturday night would have caused street flooding even if the power used to supply the city’s pumps had been at full strength but the loss of a major power source didn’t help and caused power to be rationed to pumping stations at the most critical of times, the Sewerage and Water Board said in a statement Sunday.
Even more troubling perhaps, is that any relief on the power issues appears to be at least 18 months away, taking us completely through the 2024 hurricane season and the spring and winter rainy seasons and at least part of the 2025 hurricane season.
As the heavens opened up again Saturday, in similar fashion to nearly two months ago, the streets once again filled with water and residents watched in helpless dismay as, in many cases, the rain ended but the water kept rising.
The Sewerage and Water Board announced that Turbine 4, which was built in 1915, had been taken offline seemingly just as the National Weather Service issued a Flash Flood Warning.
The malfunction is nothing new for Turbine 4, which has been in repair more often than it has worked since 2012, when it underwent a major overhaul. In fact, as late as 2019, there were plans to use Turbine 4 only as a backup.
Certainly the flooded streets weren’t limited to New Orleans as rainfall amounts on the official gauges approached six inches in some areas and on unofficial gauges (the public) some reported seven inches and more.
The rainfall caused flooding in numerous locations including, but not limited to: Treme, Gentilly, Lakeview, Uptown, Garden District, CBD and Mid-City.
The Sewerage and Water Board also repeated its long-held mantra that the city’s pumping system can only handle one inch of water in the first hour and a half inch of rain each hour after that. Those figures, the S&WB said, would mean it would take five hours to drain three inches of rainfall and the city had more than that and it was all over the city and not isolated to one spot.
Those figures, also, assume full power being available, which it was not with Turbine 4 offline and two backup generators (EMDs) also down. The EMDs, relatively new equipment, which were designed to provide redundancy when the turbines fail, have also become unreliable.
“For a storm of this intensity, we would have utilized Turbine 4 had it been available, which means we had to ration 25 Hz power. However, even under optimal operating conditions, the aging system would be overwhelmed by the level of rainfall we experienced.”
One man, whose family car was caught by the rain said he likened the city’s drainage system to a household sink that is clogged with hair. “The water goes down,” he said. “It just goes down very slowly.”
According to the S&WB news release out Sunday, there were times that the canals had been pumped down but reports continued of high water in the city, “meaning catch basins and smaller drainage lines may need to be addressed for the drainage system to function at full capacity.”
Regardless of the circumstances, it seems that the city’s residents and businesses are being told that until the new Power Complex is completed by the peak of hurricane season 2025, the city will continue to rely on unreliable turbines that are costly and time consuming to repair and maintain. Those deficiencies were a large part of WWL-TV's award-winning Down the Drain investigation in 2017. In addition, it seems there are also hiccups beyond just the power generation.
During December’s flooding event city officials came under some fire for not warning residents of the flash flooding and not implementing neutral ground parking. Those issues seemed to have been resolved this time around, but the speed and strength of the rain on a vulnerable system spelled more impassable roads, flooded cars and frustrated residents.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell famously uttered the phrase, “We are a city that floods,” after a similar event in 2018. That rang true then and remains true today.