JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — It boils down to two things: location and no backup plan.
Location:
President Cynthia Lee Sheng says the location of Tuesday’s water main break – directly in front of the water plant's purification complex on Jefferson Highway - is the first step of JP’s water system. She says it’s the worst place a break could have happened.
We’ve learned that the break was a 20-inch main in the transmission line between the water treatment plant and the entire east bank of the parish.
The Department of Public Works tells us there was water flowing through it 24/7. That pipe is *the pipe* that moves up to 87-million gallons per day from the plant… to your sink.
It leads us to our second big question: why wasn’t there a backup?
No Backup Plan:
Jefferson Parish can only tell us their system is old.
There was no bypass, no redundancy, and secondary transmission line like some other cities have.
There was only one, 80-year-old pipe that connects to the purification complex.
And the parish tells us they don’t do preventative inspections.
Public works director Mark Drewes tells WWL Louisiana “There is no cost effective practical way to inspect the subsurface distribution system, which has approximately 1,800 miles of pipe.”
But the parish has known the infrastructure is decaying. In a presentation given to Parish Council in 2021 while asking for a rate increase, the parish detailed the filthy and failing mains. They also lay out the astronomical cost of emergency water main fixes over the cost of preventative maintenance.
The rate increase was approved, and there are now billions of dollars in upgrades on the calendar over the next 20 years. But the consequences of delaying those vital fixes for years is being felt right now.
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