NEW ORLEANS — Water pressure across much of the city dipped a bit Wednesday as the Sewerage & Water Board worked on a water line at its Carrollton plant.
That left one of the two water towers designed specifically to prevent boil-water advisories offline.
At the same time the Sewerage & Water Board was doing that, Entergy New Orleans was repairing power lines damaged when a tornado touched down nearby in the early-morning hours.
In the process of making those emergency repairs, Entergy cut power to the water plant, sending pressure plummeting, leading to the latest boil-water advisory.
“Once the pressure goes below 20 (psi), it is what it is. It doesn't matter whether it was momentarily or lingering,” said Ghassan Korban, the S&WB’s executive director. “Then the system is considered compromised and (a) precautionary boil advisory is required.”
Korban said that when the agency lost Entergy's power, it fired up Turbine 6 to begin to make its own power.
The process to get that turbine working takes about 15 minutes. With one water tower working, there is a window of about 20 minutes to make a switch in power sources.
The agency said that turbine was not running Wednesday afternoon since the storms had passed by that time.
With water pressure remaining low Thursday, City Councilman Joe Giarruso said that he has competing interests given that places like hospitals still had low pressure while the work on the water main at the Sewerage & Water Board plant continued.
“I'm kind of the most concerned, honestly, about getting people restored and getting their pressure back and at the same time working,” he said.
But Giarrusso said he also wants to know if Entergy and the Sewerage & Water Board were talking to each other given the competing projects that required immediate attention.
“What were the phone calls like last night? What are correspondence and text messaging happened between the two different utilities? How are they trying to stand up the power there as quickly as possible?” he said.
City Councilman Jay Banks, who sits on the Sewerage & Water Board's board of directors, blames the agency's antiquated system on the recurring problems.
“We've got to get to the point where we can get the work done necessary so that this doesn't happen,” Banks said. “We don't need to rely on a system that has 1900s technology in the year 2021. And that's just the bottom line.”
Giarrusso has called the S&WB and Entergy before the City Council’s Public Works Committee for a special meeting Tuesday at 10 a.m. to discuss Wednesday’s power outage and boil advisory.