City officials will hire the French conglomerate Veolia to assist the city in analyzing what has gone wrong with the the city's troubled drainage system, but it remains unclear who will ultimately take over temporary private management of the Sewerage & Water Board.I hope the study doesn't end up recommending privatization as the bestest way to do "resiliency" because Mitch already promised he wasn't interested in privatizing anything. I especially hope Veolia's study doesn't recommend turning management over to Veolia. Their track record isn't so good.
It's also not clear how much it's going to cost to execute two key contracts, including the one with Veolia. In addition to that contract, which Mayor Mitch Landrieu's spokesman Tyronne Walker said will pay for a "resiliency and asset management study," the city plans to hire New Orleans-based engineering firm CH2M to provide management, emergency operations and maintenance for the city's drainage system and its power supply.
As for CH2M, they've already been working on one turbine for five years. In 2013 they were expected to keep at it for another "seven to eight months."
Of the plant's four turbines, No. 4 has been out of commission for about six months, with another seven or eight months left in its federally subsidized overhaul. FEMA has poured about $12.5 million into repairing it, Becker said.
It's still not working. But that won't stop them from going to work on the rest of these now.
CH2M will plan to return the three out-of-service turbines to service and acquire backup power sources. Walker said that CH2M has "intimate knowledge of S&WB systems" and will be able to "ramp up" to a more robust effort that will be focused on turbine and power capacity building. The firm will hire a number of subcontractors to assist in that work, although it's not yet clear how many or at what cost.It's a good thing they've spent so much time acquiring all that "intimate knowledge." That comes in handy around here.
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