NEW ORLEANS — People across New Orleans are preparing for another rainy weekend. The Sewerage and Water Board notified customers today of limited power ahead of the anticipated rainy weekend.
This comes just one week after streets across New Orleans were flooded due to turbine outages, which left the S&WB without enough energy to pump off the rain waters.
WWL Louisiana's Amelia Strahan spoke with two neighbors who experienced heavy flooding last weekend and has their take on how it was handled.
“The city knowing that we had the problems we had last week and they tell us today we’re no more prepared than we were prior to last week is disconcerting," said one neighbor.
Ryan Cox woke up to a call last Saturday from his neighbor, telling him to move his car to higher ground.
"My wife and I put on crappie shoes and trudged through the water to try to get it out of the water," he said.
Cox's daughter's car was parked on Octavia Street and quickly filled up with water.
"We got it out of the deep water and onto the street and we started bailing it and drying it. And we spent the better part of this week doing that," Cox told Strahan.
They were able to save their daughter's car, but his neighbor Jeane was not so lucky.
"Like, the car flooded! I’ve been checking it all night to make sure the water didn’t go up and it just went up so quickly!"
Jeane Charlobois Mercedes was a victim of the floodwaters, leaving her family with just one car.
“I have to take my husband to work and then pick him up and work around my busy work schedule and it’s quite unfortunate to say the least," she told Strahan.
Neither neighbor was aware of how bad things were going to get when they went to bed Friday night. This lack of communication was brought up in Wednesday's City Hall meeting.
Director of the New Orleans Homeland Security, Collin Arnold said "I was more concerned about the tornado watch an about lightening, then I was about continued rainfall. That was an error on my part given the circumstances that occurred," in Wednesday's meeting.
With the threat of potential flooding this weekend, The Office of Homeland Security issued a statement saying "NOHSEP has been coordinating with SWBNO ahead of this weekend and Nola Ready is prepared to alert the public as need."
City Council member Eugene Green says while the city waits on improvements to its pumping stations, the council is doing everything they can.
"We are very much sympathetic to our citizens and we want to let them know we fight every day to find the engineering and make the resources and technology to be able to mitigate the funding," he said.
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