NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board doesn’t have enough power to run all of its drainage pumps.
Key elements of the utility’s power generation equipment are currently offline and could be until at least May, dangerously close to the start of hurricane season.
Turbine 4, a crucial power generator for the utility has been offline since February. Repairs to the steam-operated, often broken, 110-year-old unit proved to be more complicated than expected. Making matters worse, operator error during testing has now delayed the return of Turbine 4 another five to seven weeks.
“Had a really unfortunate incident this weekend,” SWBNO General Superintendent Steve Nelson said. “We’re in the process of isolating the issue of water getting into our oil system. We’re on what we believe is the last step of that.”
Three of the water board’s five backup generators are also out of service. Two were already broken, and another experienced an issue during last weekend’s storm and is currently offline.
“That EMD that’s down, we had an issue with some communication equipment there,” Nelson said. “Fortunately, I was told yesterday that the supplier has that piece of equipment on the shelf. They should be installing that within the week.”
That leaves the utility with the capacity to produce 38 megawatts of power.
That’s six megawatts short of what the city needs to run all the pumps during a heavy downpour.
“The power isn’t working the way that it needs to, and I don’t want people to be wringing their hands every time that it rains,” New Orleans City Councilman Joe Giarrusso said. “Yes, we can’t have an old piece of machinery offline because of operator error. We need to get those EMDs up and running.”
In a related matter, the water board admits the $30 million Entergy substation now being built to provide a reliable source of electricity to city drainage pumps could end up costing another $20 million.
“We can’t derail the project and delay it for another 6, 9 months,” Giarrusso said. “It’s too important. We can’t do that. On the other hand, we can’t turn around every two or three months and have another $20 million or $30 million bill, either.”
Giarrusso says he has requested an update from Sewerage and Water Board officials at a special budget committee hearing now scheduled for April 2.
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