Return to normalcy

Ha, see, you probably thought this was going to be about the Democratic national ticket. But, no, Wine Mom and Football Dad will have to wait. Even more normal things than that are happening in New Orleans. 

The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board issued a boil water advisory for the city's entire east bank and Algiers Point Tuesday night after a power outage at the Carrollton and Algiers water plants. 

The outages caused water pressure to drop across the city, prompting the advisory "out of an abundance of caution," S&WB said. The cause of the power outage is under investigation.

It's been a while since we've had a citywide boil advisory.  I can't begin to guess why the Boil Order Decade came to a pause, but I would start with assuming they just stopped reporting the minor outages.  When the pressure goes down everywhere at dinnertime, though, too many people notice. So they have to pretend to act. 

The initial press release raises several questions.  

The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (SWBNO), in consultation with the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) has issued a precautionary boil water advisory (BWA) for the East Bank of New Orleans and Algiers Point. A map will be forthcoming.

Water pressures in thease areas fell below 20 pounds per square inch (psi) due to power failure at the Carrollton Water Treatment plant. The Algiers Water Treatment plant was also briefly affected by this power outage. The cause of the power failure is still being investigated. Water pressure to the New Orleans Eastbank and Algiers Point have been restored, but a precautionary boil water advisory is necessary until water samples can be collected and tested.

How long was the power to the pumps out? In 2019, SWB installed two "water hammer" towers that are supposed to maintain pressure in the event of a power outage for up to 40 minutes.  Entergy tells WWLTV that tonight's outage was a "brief power fluctuation."  Is and event that can be described in those terms, more than the "hammers" can handle?  If so, what good are they? 

How is it that the "brief power fluctuation" affected both the East and West bank treatment plants?  I didn't think they were connected. Also what is going on with Entergy in general?  Anecdotally, we've been experiencing little brown outs around here just about every evening this summer.  I haven't seen any explanation for this. 

In fact, it seems like they aren't even trying to communicate anymore.  Tonight, for example, when tasked with explaining the brief fluctuation that somehow overcame SWB's big expensive hazard mitigation system, they just went into their bag of standard excuses and pulled out...

BREAKING: A spokesperson with Entergy N.O. says a Mylar balloon is behind tonight's power outage that led to SWBNO losing power and the subsequent boil water advisory that is currently affecting almost all of the city. @WWLTV @CmGiarrusso

— Lily Cummings (@lilyrcummings) August 7, 2024

Balloon? On both sides of the river at once? That's enough to knock out the most critical public infrastructure in the city? Still? After so many rounds of this?  No way that makes sense. 

On the other hand, it's an extremely normal thing to hear from them.

The Boil Order Decade

It felt like we measured out the 2010s in the time spent between the several boil orders.  So much so, that by the end of the decade, it stopped feeling like anything out of the ordinary. And, of course, in the 20s, the global pandemic made our little home grown perpetual public health crisis seem practically pedestrian by comparison. It's just expected now the every so often, the water pressure will drop and people will have to take precautions.  That's resilience!  We even figured out a way to limit the boil orders to specific neighborhoods now so they seem like even less of a big deal. That's innovation!  As we all know, resilience and innovation are synonymous with the global brand of New Orleans. 

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration has fumbled a $141 million grant for green infrastructure projects, according to a report from a federal watchdog, with poor planning, misallocation of funds and a lack of workers undercutting the city's efforts to keep stormwater at bay.

In one case, a grant-funded program to add porous pavement and other upgrades to New Orleans homes — which the city has previously touted as a success — was so poorly handled that it actually made some properties more vulnerable to flooding, according to an audit released this week by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General.

The audit, conducted over nine months ending in July 2023, said construction had not started on any of the eight grant-funded infrastructure projects comprising the “Gentilly Resilience District,” which is supposed to hold stormwater in redesigned green spaces that would otherwise flow directly to the often-overwhelmed city drainage system.

 Okay well nevermind that right now. It's a global brand, trust me.

Following her participation in an international climate change conference in Dubai last December, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced she had signed a major new deal with a private company to significantly reduce the city’s carbon emissions and boost its drinking water and energy efficiencies.

The announcement was a public relations win for Cantrell after more than a year of being criticized for maintaining a busy travel schedule without any major results to show for them.

The Dec. 8 press release outlined the ambitious project the city would undertake with Zoetic Inc., an Ohio-based HV/AC coolant manufacturer. Described in the release as “a leading U.S.-based climate impact company with a portfolio of carbon reduction solutions,” Zoetic would be tasked with “increasing sustainability, including significant carbon reduction and water and energy resiliency.”

But more than three months later, the only thing Cantrell has to show for the trip remains the press release. In fact, internal administration documents indicate that after an initial flurry of behind-the-scenes activity, the project has completely halted.

Those documents also show Cantrell appears to have made the deal unilaterally within hours of meeting Zoetic’s founder. According to these records, Cantrell never consulted staff experts back in New Orleans before signing it, and the press release caught even her top climate-related aides off guard.

With city staffers scrambling to figure out what the agreement actually meant for the city, several people involved raised questions about the Zoetic deal, including one city employee who called the company “sketchy.”

Alright well put a pin in that one too. The point is, we're resilient now.  The streets flood every time it rains for a few hours and the water gets all amoebaed up every time a main breaks and we are not fazed one bit by it.  

That doesn't mean we can't be a little curious, though. I mean, maybe once or twice over the course of the Boil Order Decade, you may have wondered where does all the clean water our bills say we've been paying for go anyway? Well, now we know. 

NEW ORLEANS — The office of the Inspector General released a report outlining failures within the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans.

The report says that infrastructure weaknesses, plus metering and billing errors created significant water loss.

According to the report, "SWBNO water losses were found to be consistently above the highest range of industry averages of 45.5 percent, with a ten-year average of non-revenue water of approximately 73 percent between 2008 and 2017. OIG evaluators found the SWBNO continued to experience similar rates in 2021 and 2022, with 75 percent water loss in 2021 and 64 percent water loss in 2022."

The OIG says the water board did not follow industry standards, resulting in a combined loss of over $19 million over two years.

They've been pouring it straight into the ground.  Now, from what we understand, several of the stalled "Resilience District" projects had to do with creating stormwater retention facilities. This, we were told, had a dual benefit. They would supposedly lessen the stress on the drainage system by lowering the volume of water that had to be pumped out immediately. They also were supposed to be good for maintaining the soils beneath the city famously vulnerable to subsidence caused by over-efficient drainage.  But here we see that, even though, the retention projects weren't being build, S&WB was more than making up for it by dumping the water back into the soil anyway.  Score another one for innovation.

The New Boil Order Decade

The answer is five. If you were keeping score at home, write down five was the number of consecutive days we were able to go before the first boil order of 2020.

The Sewerage & Water Board issued a boil water advisory for the West Bank Monday afternoon, the second time such a notice has been issued for the area in less than a month.

In a press release, the S&WB said water pressure dropped on the West Bank while crews were making a repair to Mardi Gras Boulevard.

Reset your counters to zero. 

The Boil Order Decade

Guys, it has been a heckuva weekend. Multiple building collapses, exploding water mains, democracy under threat (again).  It really feels like anything could happen.  Please somebody check the jaguar cage just in case.

But I don't think I've ever seen a double boil order.  That's new.

After lifting a boil water advisory early Monday morning for Uptown New Orleans, the Sewerage & Water Board has now reinstated it, officials said at 10:30 a.m., following another drop in water pressure.

The updated advisory from the S&WB did not state the cause of the second drop in pressure. On Saturday, a water main burst near the corner of Lowerline and Panola streets, flooding the streets as well as nearby yards and causing a drop in water pressure across large swaths of Uptown.

The Boil Order Decade

Just the ordinary routine stuff.

A drop in water pressure on Thursday evening has caused Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans officials to issue a boil water advisory for the Lower 9th Ward and parts of New Orleans East.

The advisory was issued just after 9:30 p.m. for all of the Lower 9th Ward and parts of the Little Woods neighborhood bound by Bullard Avenue, Interstate 10, Paris Road and Lake Pontchartrain.

The advisory was still in effect Friday morning. It wasn't immediately clear when it would be lifted.

Probably will be lifted sometime this evening if it follows the normal pattern.  Anyway via McBride, enjoy some optimistic quotes from Joe Becker and Cedric Grant in 2015 about the world class "resilient" system they were building.

The boil order decade

Seems we are still living in it.  One thing that's happened in the last year or so is we've started getting these precisely defined boil orders that affect very specific areas rather than just the east or west bank or "areas east of the Industrial Canal" or whatever.

The boil water advisory extends from Almonaster Avenue to the Industrial Canal and includes all of the Lower 9th Ward. New Orleans East is not affected by the advisory, according to a news release from the S&WB.

It's like we're getting better at tracking and containing the wild amoeba.  But our science is some ways away from stopping it altogether.  It's kind of like the jaguar in that regard, I guess. 

The Boil Order Decade

I always enjoy when these happen during football season. It gives us something to talk about with visiting fans from the opposing teams.  Eh... we're used to it, we'll say.  We even stopped counting them some fourteen boil orders ago.  (Hell, S&WB  missed one themselves last month.)

But since each of these is different in its own way, like a snowflake that you have to boil, let's look at the special circumstances that characterize this one. Most significant to note, is this pressure loss event happened despite the availability of a new "water hammer" tower specifically designed to mitigate these circumstances. 

Sewerage & Water Board officials said Wednesday that one of two new water storage towers is now online. The tower has been estimated to give about 20 minutes of relief during a pressure drop and to help reduce the chances for a boil advisory, according to utility officials.

Saturday’s advisory came after a power loss to distribution system pumps 2 and 3 at the the S&WB’s Claiborne Avenue plant at 6:22 am. The new water tower held system pressure for 20 minutes from 6:22 a.m. to 6:42 a.m.

Then, however, pressure dropped below 20 pounds per square inch at east bank sites. Pressure returned to normal at 6:50 a.m.

Oh man, that eight critical minutes, right? And after they just got finished telling us on Wednesday that it was "difficult to imagine" this could happen. 

“It’s difficult to imagine we won’t be able to recover before that tower runs out of water, for lack of a better term,” Labat said. “Please understand that it is possible, but I’m comfortable with that (20-minute) time frame.”

Well, maybe next time they'll get it. Matt McBride wrote about the new tower on Facebook this week. Or towers, we should say. They're almost ready with the second one which, should buy us an extra 20 minutes in the future... for twice the price, of course.  McBride also points out this added cost is directly attributable to decades of deferred maintenance to the underground pipe system.

What does this boil down to? Essentially, to get to a 40 minute buffer when pumps go down, the S&WB had to build two towers instead of one, because in those 40 minutes, 20 minutes of flow will just go out to leaks. The S&WB said the project was built for $80 million in federal taxpayer dollars (advertised as $49 million just three years ago). So it's a good bet that somewhere between an extra $20 million to $40 million were invested in this project due strictly to the massive amount of water that never reaches anyone's faucets, but simply goes into the ground or down the drain. Admittedly, the folks working at the Board since the recent inception of this project could not have plugged 77 MGD of leaks in three or four years, since the leaks developed over decades; they were forced into this situation. But when people ask, "Where is all the money going?" look at the second tower at the Carrollton plant - a monument to decades of waste.

Waste, or more to the point, neglect as decision makers find other priorities such as, oh, I don't know, taking a public funding surplus that could be used to invest in critical infrastructure and using it instead  to subsidize wealthy hotel developers.

A plan by New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell to ask state lawmakers to shift some hotel taxes from tourism to the ailing infrastructure of the Sewerage &Water Board was dealt a major, and likely fatal, blow on Tuesday when Gov. John Bel Edwards came out against the idea.

Edwards panned the nascent proposal, which Cantrell was expected to push in next year’s legislative session, at an event held by the Bureau of Governmental Research, saying he was “not at all interested” in trimming the tax dollars the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and local tourism groups now receive.

In other words, it's more important that we continue to build newer and shinier amusements for visitors like the Eagles fans we'll have a good laugh explaining boil orders to tomorrow, than it is that we build a reliable water system for our residents. At least the tourism marketing board will have plenty money to spend on the next slogan that replaces #FollowYourNOLA or #CityOfYes.  I kind of like the ring of #DifficultToImagine, myself.

The boil order decade

It happened again. 

Residents in the Lower 9th Ward have been asked to boil water if they intend to use it after a pump was taken offline at a Sewerage and Water Board plant.

People in that area are asked not to drink, make ice or brush their teeth with tap water until further notice.

Water pressure in the area dropped below 20 psi, which automatically triggers such an advisory. The pressure dropped after a pump at the Carrollton Water Plant was taken offline about 8 a.m., and another pump was brought online.

Other area of the city were not affected. 

This thing where they lose pressure at Carrollton but it only affects the Lower Nine is relatively new. I think this is the second one this year. What causes that?   

All the boil orders

Total of fifteen "incidents" leading to nine boil orders (east and west bank combined) over a period of five years.

Pretty good data to display up on Cedric Grant's $30,000 "interactive whiteboard"

It's barely even newsworthy anymore

This might be the seventh to tenth one of these since 2010. I've seriously lost count.

NEW ORLEANS – The New Orleans east bank is again under a boil water advisory.

The water board announced the precautionary boil water advisory Wednesday evening, two months after an advisory in July lasted nearly 48 hours.

The water board plant experienced a power surge and lost pressure, according to a spokesman, which caused the plant to drop below 15 psi.

The advisory is in effect until further notice. The water board hasn't given a timeline for when the advisory may be lifted.

I think we all know the drill by now.  

The email pipe is still clogged

One evening in late November  2010 the city suffered a loss of water pressure at 10:30 pm. Within 45 minutes, S&WB knew they would have to issue a boil water advisory. But, due to communications problems, it took several hours for that to happen. 

Within 45 minutes of the breakdown, which occurred just before 10:30 on a Friday night, water board officials knew they likely would have to issue a boil-water advisory urging residents not to use tap water for drinking, eating, cooking or bathing.

But it wasn't until almost 2 a.m. Saturday that the advisory went out to local news outlets. Even then, Mayor Mitch Landrieu's communications director didn't get the word for another hour, despite her repeated requests to the water board for information.

Ultimately, it took until after 8 a.m. -- long after many people had used tap water to shower, brush their teeth and make their morning coffee -- for City Hall to spread the news, which affected some 300,000 residents and tourists, via its e-mail and text alert system.

The controversy that ensued resulted in everyone vowing to get it right next time even if it meant sending the police to the mayor's house in the middle of the night.

St. Martin and Sneed said on Friday that they have changed their emergency protocols as a result. In the future, they said, they will call senior city officials at their home and cell phones -- or dispatch police to rouse them, if necessary -- when major problems occur at night.

They never quite got that system worked out although they've ample occasion to practice. The next boil advisory was issued in 2012 after a 5 hour delay. 

New Orleanians went about their usual morning routines Monday, showering, brushing their teeth, eating breakfast, unaware that a short, sudden drop in water pressure might have compromised the city's water supply. The Sewerage & Water Board, which manages the city's potable water system, knew about the glitch a little after 8:30 a.m., but didn't tell east bank residents until 1 p.m. that they should boil their water to guard against harmful bacteria.

This time we were told the problem was.. something something something.. Bobby Jindal, probably.

Officials said Monday's incident had little in common with what happened in November 2010. The lengthy consultation with state officials, not faulty after-hours policies, led to the latest delay in alerting the public, St. Martin said.

The next year the problem was a water main break.  The advisory lag was still about the same, though.

Six hours after a water main break in the Carrollton neighborhood flooded several streets Tuesday morning, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board advised residents and businesses in a large swath of Uptown to boil tap water before drinking, bathing or rinsing food with it.

Today's advisory didn't happen until 10:00 am. That's about seven hours after S&WB lost water pressure. Although today, unlike in 2010 when they knew within an hour, they're telling us that's just how long it takes to determine anything. 

So why did it take more than seven hours -- after most of the city went through its breakfast and pre-work routines -- for officials to alert the public? The answer, officials said, involves the time needed to determine whether the water supply was at risk.

After Sewerage and Water Board responded to the interruption in power and switched to a backup source, it began a comprehensive assessment of water pressure readings around the city, spokesman Robert Jackson said. Once a determination was made that enough pressure readings dropped below the safe 15-pounds-per-square-inch threshold, the boil order was issued.

But that's not what they've said in the past.  Have they just given up trying to get this right?

Amoeba fatigue

What if you lived in a city where boil orders happened so frequently that they barely held anyone's attention?

A precautionary boil water advisory has been issued for the east bank of New Orleans on Friday morning (July 24) after the Sewerage & Water Board's Carrollton Water Plant experienced a number of power surges, S&WB officials said.

"Residents in the affected area are advised not to drink, make ice, brush teeth, bathe or shower, prepare or rinse food with tap water unless it has been properly disinfected, until further notice," said a S&WB news release.

The New Orleans Recreation Development Commission announced that all New Orleans east bank pools are closed until further notice because of the advisory. The Behrman Pool on the West Bank is not affected.

That would be one exciting life, right? This is something like the fourth one of these we've had since 2010. This time it's Entergy's fault, possibly.

Water board officials blamed the advisory on Entergy power surges that caused interruptions in the water system's Claiborne and Panola pumping stations.

"Because of these Entergy Power surges, water pressure unexpectedly dropped to 20 pounds per square inch at the S&WB Carrollton WAter Plant for a few minutes and may have dropped below 15 psi in areas throughout the east bank water system," officials said.

The threshold established for a boil water advisory is 15 psi, they said.

The water board switched from power supplied by Entergy to its internal power production system at the water plant and by 3:20 a.m. had stabilized water pressure.

S&WB and Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals officials are now taking water samples across the east bank for testing.

Water back to full pressure at 3:20 am. Public alerted at 10:00 am. Everybody showered in amoebas this morning. But that's fine. We're used to it.