New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board Director Ghassan Korban said Tuesday the city’s pumping and drainage system is in a “good place” ahead of Francine.
Ninety of 99 drainage pumps are working across its 24 pumping stations, he said, and the city has 70 megawatts available to power its drainage pumps, above the 44 needed to run the system at peak demand.
Korban said 70 megawatts “is probably one of the highest numbers we've seen in a long, long time ... Today, this is the best that we can all really count on.”
The large generators the Sewerage and Water Board uses to supplement its turbines and provide power to its drainage system went offline for about 15 minutes late Wednesday as Francine battered New Orleans, leading to widespread flooding.
Canals were high in Hollygrove, Lakeview, Gentilly, and New Orleans at 10 p.m., and over 30 locations in the city were flooded, according to Streetwise NOLA.
Nobody could have predicted...
20.5 of those 70 megawatts are carried by overhead lines from four east bank frequency changers, which themselves are well over 50 years old.
— Matt McBride (@Matthew67052126) September 10, 2024
12.5 MW come from EMDs which are wildly unreliable.
T4 (18 MW) failed in December and February when it was called upon. https://t.co/PuprII1ws5
We'll know more tomorrow. But tonight there is widespread street flooding both in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Right now I'm listening to Helena Moreno tell Channel 4 that Sewerage and Water Board had problems with the EMD generators and that it lost Entergy power a couple of times during the night. She has used the phrase "whack-a-mole" several times. She says there are Lakeview and Gentilly residents reporting flooding where there hasn't previously been flooding.
Anyway, we'll see about all that later. Meanwhile, just keep in mind that Francine ended up being, basically, a direct hit on New Orleans. Here is a picture of the eyewall approaching a little after 7:30. We're actually lucky that it was already being torn apart by wind shear at this point. If this had been a major hurricane there could have been catastrophic damage.
As it stands, the damage looks to have been significantly annoying at the very least. (Approximately 350,000 without power, for example.) Anyway, we'll know more about all that later. One thing we can't say at this point is that we're in an especially "good place."
