NEW ORLEANS — Update: S&WB officials announced Sunday afternoon the advisory was lifted for all properties in the affected area.
A couple walked home through the water and mud, carrying gallons of water on their shoulders. Their car wouldn't make it.
One man washed the brick steps up to his house, dipping his bucket into the street to get water. He didn't want the mud to cake on them.
A father handed his son a pair of shoes. The teen had taken his off to dry his feet after wading through the ankle-deep flood.
Along Claiborne Avenue, one of the busiest streets in New Orleans, water flowed down the streets instead of cars Friday as New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board crews worked to repair a massive water main break which closed schools and forced a precautionary boil water advisory for much of the Uptown area.
Isadore Newman School senior Troy Bush Jr. sat in the drivers seat of his now flooded car, taking a moment to rest while waiting for a tow truck after he and his father pushed the vehicle out of floodwaters
"They put one of those little (cones) up, but I was thinking it was one of those pothole things. I went around it," he said. "I shouldn't have gone down the street, but there was a little barrier. There's nothing on the actual street. There's no actual cone where the water is."
By 10 a.m., after he had gotten stuck and moved the car, S&WB crews put up more imposing barriers keeping residents away from the flooded street.
"I was thinking 'if this is the most flooded street, there should be some trucks or something,'" Bush Jr. said.
Bush Jr. has a week left before he graduates, but was turned away from school -- and into the flood -- because classes had been cancelled. And he wasn't alone. Officials from 11 nearby schools closed campuses Friday because of the boil water advisory. Drinking fountains, sinks and toilets all lacked the water pressure to function properly in the hours after the break.
“I threw on my rain boots and walked to school,” said Susan Morley, a teacher at Green Charter who lives near the break. “We were supposed to have our final day of testing today.”
Almost as soon as she got to school, she said, the buses were bringing kids back home.
Bush's father, a New Orleans Police Officer, said he blamed the water main break on a lack of infrastructure funding.
"The infrastructure of this city is just crumbling," Bush Sr. said. "This is one of the symptoms of a lot of the tourist dollars that come in the city that don't go towards the infrastructure that's needed."
Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who has been trying to broker a deal to get the city of New Orleans additional funding for infrastructure, especially to shore up the troubled sewerage and water system, sent out a series of Tweets Friday morning.
"I spoke to the Ways and Means committee on April 23 about the very issue we are facing this morning with a water main break that is reportedly 114 years old," she tweeted. "I can't make this stuff up. We need just a bit more of what we generate to take care of ourselves."
Other residents tried to mitigate the water damage to their homes. One, James Evermore, tried to use the floodwater to his benefit, washing down his front yard and steps with the same water that was bringing mud into his yard.
"I don't want to track mud into my house," he explained. "I had to use it to flush my toilet too. No water at all."
The barefoot man then got back to work, scooping up water flowing down the street in front of his house and carrying it back towards the walkway up to his front door.
Evermore and other Uptown residents (from S. Carrollton Ave. to Napoleon Ave. and from S. Claiborne Ave. to the Mississippi River) will be under a boil water advisory for at least another day after crews manage to stop the flow of water.
But the problem area appeared to be shrinking Friday. Along Freret Street, about a half-mile from the break, popular lunch restaurants began opening up their shutters for the early crowd around 11 a.m.
Employees at Good Bird, one of the restaurants along the well-trafficked street, said their water wasn't flowing that morning, but that at some point pressure was restored for them.
Some restaurants in the area -- notably coffee shops -- remained closed, unable to provide food and drinks to customers with the advisory in effect.
“We need water to clean, water to cook,” said Edwin Ponce, the general manager at Bearcat Café, which was forced to close for part of the morning.
But for some Uptown business owners, issues like this are no surprise. Chris Deemers at Kolache Kitchen said he is always ready.
“Building a place in Uptown New Orleans, you have to anticipate the pitfalls and hiccups,” Deemers said.
City officials have not given an estimate for when water pressure would be restored to the Uptown area. In the meantime, crews continued to pump water out of the water main, diverting it from the break and directly into nearby sewer drains.
