NEW ORLEANS — Drainage Operations crews for the Sewerage and Water Board are out in the city today getting ready for the upcoming rain.
They are lowering the water in drainage canals, and have also scheduled more essential employees to work through the storms until Friday evening.
The Sewerage and Water Board tells us that for power to run the pumps, Turbines 5 and 6 are available, and there are generators.
As our Down the Drain team has been reporting, Turbine 4, which was supposed to be fixed by now, is still out, but is currently being tested. And after next Wednesday's board meeting, they should have a better idea about its timing to come online.
Meanwhile, business owners are left to make their own flood plans.
Meg: “So, how many times do you have to keep lifting up stuff?”
José Gouggh, Sheet metal worker for Orleans Sheet Metal: “Like eight years’ worth, eight years. It gets old. Yes, we have to raise all the machines and everything.”
Over near Orleans Avenue and Broad Street, sheet metal workers like Gouggh, at Orleans Sheet Metal Works and Roofing have video after video of what happens when it rains.
“Here we got a bus passing by with kids, car flooded right there. That's my car, the owner's cars,” points out Gouggh.
Very heavy fabrication machines, worth upwards of $60,000 each, have to be raised before every storm. Two days of production are lost. And they have to bring in more workers for the clean up.
“We would flood every time there was a hard rain. When they took the vehicles out of the canals, it seemed to have gotten a little bit better for a while, but then recently it seems as though the pumps don't come on,” said Tracy Alonzo, co-owner of Orleans Sheet Metal Works and Roofing.
Over in the 800 block of Fulton Street, hotel garage workers already have sandbags poised, ready to fight rainwaters that always seem to accumulate and get in.
At Perfect Presentations florist across the street, rain, and drivers don't mix.
“The problems that we have is when we have cars that come through, screaming down the street, like normal, and that's when we get the wakes, and we get water inside the facilities,” said Johnny Lopez, owner of Perfect Presentations.
“Yeah when they fly through here, it makes it even worse, 'cause like the water already high, so it's like pushing up to like the door, and when we come in like in the inside of our floor, on our door it be always be wet,” said Blake Robinson, owner of The Loyalty Club.
He is right down the street. He is also the drummer for rapper G-Eazy and designs clothes for his store. He says rain on Fulton Street means you're not going home any time soon at the end of the work day.
“This street gets very, very flooded. It's like you can't even like leave once it starts raining, and it don't even have to be like a hard, hard rain, said Robinson.
And workers with Blake and at some of the restaurants nearby, have come out to waterlogged cars.
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