NEW ORLEANS — The beleaguered New Orleans Sewerage and Water system was hit with rainfall totals it couldn’t keep up with and lost critical backup power for some drainage pumps causing floodwaters to linger and enter homes in Lakeview. Antiquated parts also failed in the sewerage system, causing the city to ask residents to limit water usage due to concerns that sewage could back up into homes.
Sewerage and Water Board Executive Director Ghassan Korban said the well-documented power improvements are still a year away but that no system anywhere in America could have kept up with rainfall totals of three to four inches per hour that Hurricane Francine dumped on the city Wednesday night.
“We have to cobble 10 or more systems of power to be able to provide power to all these pumps throughout the city and we do the best we can,” he told WWL Louisiana’s Morning News team. “Three to four inches an hour would overwhelm any storm sewer system and would cause flooding. I know this doesn’t give people any comfort, but that’s a fact.”
Korban did say that five large generators, referred to as EMDs, failed during the hardest rainfall. Those electro-motive diesel generators are only five years old, the newest part of the agency’s power generation system.
He said that those failures impacted Lakeview, but even with those generators functioning, the same amount of flooding would have occurred. The failures just slowed the process of draining the water out.
“Whether we had full power or not, that was going to back up, unfortunately. It did set us back in the rate of lowering that water.”
In addition, the city lost electric power to one of its two major sewage pumping systems, which removes wastewater from homes and businesses and delivers it to a treatment plant.
“That station is not operational as of now,” said Korban. “We can’t process the wastewater and pump it to the treatment plant.”
Korban says that a part failed and that, like much of the city’s system, it is not an easy piece of equipment to replace. He said that they will make an effort to bypass that part, which regulates the flow of sewer water to the treatment plant, but that New Orleans may be asked to limit water usage for another day or two.
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