NEW ORLEANS — It took five months to get Turbine 4 back online.
The 109-year-old steam-powered generator is a key piece of equipment supplying electricity to run New Orleans drainage pumps.
It broke down during a heavy rainstorm in February, contributing to flooded streets when the Sewerage and Water Board suddenly couldn’t power all the pumps.
The utility’s Executive Director Ghassan Korban is thankful T-4 is finally back in operation.
“That obviously adds a significant amount of power that we generate to the overall power generation capacity that we have,” Korban said.
With T-4 back online, the SWBNO has more than 67 megawatts of power capacity.
The city needs 44 megawatts to run all of the pumps during peak demand.
General Superintendent Steve Nelson admits it’s not easy to repair equipment this old because replacement parts don’t exist, and they need to be manufactured.
“The big pieces of equipment that we had to get put in place were the bearings,” Nelson said. “Those were placed in and then we had to make sure running through our tests we had all of the different parts and pieces downstream of the bearings working correctly.”
Sewerage and Water Board officials say the return of Turbine 4 moves the utility’s power capacity to a much more comfortable level going into the peak of hurricane season.
“That’s kind of where T4 would be used if we had a named event, we would be able to have that in reserve for us,” Nelson said. “It’s still over 100 years old, so it still is a fairly challenging piece of equipment.”
Turbines 5 and 6 are also available to power the pumps in addition to 4 of 5 emergency backup generators known as EMDs.
The SWBNO is now building an Entergy power substation on the grounds of the utility’s Carrollton water plant.
That is expected to have future capacity to run all of the drainage pumps and supply drinkable water to the city.
The power complex is expected to be online by the peak hurricane season next year.
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