NEW ORLEANS — Tuesday’s rain didn’t fall for too long but resulted in about three to four inches in a short period of time. The downpour caused hours of flooding for some residents in Lakeview. One resident, Rita Legrand, says the water was almost to her front door.
“It kept coming up and up on my lawn to my first step my house isn’t very high so I didn’t want to get any water in the house so it was pretty scary,” Legrand said.
She has two catch basins near her home, and says she was monitoring both of them closely. She says though, the water was collecting but it didn’t look like it was receding into the catch basin.
“You could see when the water is really over it, you can see it pulled down into the drain and you didn’t see it at all yesterday, even when the water started going down,” Legrand says.
According to Sewerage and Water Board (SWB), pump station 12 did go offline around 5 p.m. Tuesday, for about an hour due to an issue with the electrical breaker. An SWB representative adds, pump station 12 going down shouldn’t have had much of an effect on the water receding properly into the catch basins.
“During this time, elevation of the canal was low enough to continue to drain and retain the rainwater that was draining from the streets,” an SWB representative said in a statement to WWLTV. “When rain intensities are high – over one inch an hour – residents may see localized street flooding. SWBNO’s drainage system can handle one inch of rain per hour and a half or inch of rain each hour after that. That means three inches of rain can take up to five hours to drain.”
Councilmember Joe Giarrusso says he saw the water pooling on top of catch basins himself, and worries that issues New Orleans residents constantly face, are not being fixed.
“[SWB] say they’re almost done with the drainage study, good but implementation is what’s important now. We know there are fundamental problems in a system at multiple places so those problems have to be addressed as quickly as possible,” Giarrusso says.
Giarrusso points to newly constructed streets in the Lakeview area, and says while the new construction is good, those newly repaired streets shouldn’t be met with bad flooding.
“How do you explain to residents we’re tearing up streets, we’re installing new infrastructure, we’re giving you the best thing possible but you can see with your own two eyes that water is there,” Giarrusso said.