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.