The Information Super-Frog

Some post Isaac analysis on one of the essential New Orleans blogs, "Fix the Pumps". Yipes. In short, nope things ain't fixed yet, some preventable serious close calls, and if you think of the Surge & Watabode as bumbling, the ACOE who we now rely on to keep from flooding make the S&WB look like Nobel Prize winners.

Fix the Pumps: Isaac in New Orleans - what we know so far

I guess I owe an apology for my recent post comparing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to the Three Stooges.

The United States would be safer in the hands of the Stooges.

Fix the Pumps Blog: Oh. My. God.

Expanding on a point briefly mentioned yesterday:

The entity in charge of pumping tap water in and sewage and drainage water out of New Orleans is the Sewerage & Water Board, or in local pronunciation the "Surge an Watta Board", or the above title.

A friend tells a story of a woman who moved into her neighborhood from up north. My friend saw a city worker come up to the new arrival's new home to turn on the water. The worker knocked on the gate and announced, "Surge an Wattabode." The woman looked down from her porch and said, "Uh, we don't want any." "Surge an Wattabode, Lady!" "I said we don't want any." The water man shrugged his sholders and left.

The Board was established in 1899, and in its early decades was an internationally admired model, thanks to local legend A. Baldwin Wood. Engineer inventor Wood was one smart cookie, who invented dozens of new and improved plumbing, drainage, and sewage devices and designs, with all of his patents specifying that they could be used without royalty payments by his home town of New Orleans. His high capacity low maintance "Wood Screw Pumps" were adapted by the Netherlands for the Zuiderzee draining project.

Of course the city Wood designed his system for was less than 1/3rd the area that New Orleans would spread out into, and through the late 20th century the Sewage and Water Board was constantly trying to catch up drainage facilities and capacity to the much larger, developed, blacktopped, and lowlying array of neighborhoods.

The section of Interstate 10 connecting New Orleans with Metarie, the largest suburb, goes under a railroad track near the Parish line. Why highway designers put in underpasses rather than overpasses in a city with such a high water table I won't speculate-- and in this case they even had some of the city's above ground graveyards visible beside the highway. Can you possibly guess a potential problem here? Yep, it floods and becomes impassible in heavy rains. After this major evacuation route was blocked off when some folks were trying to leave as Hurricane Georges threatened the Gulf, it was decided to do something about this. For some no doubt good reason incomprehensible to my layman friends and myself, instead of making this part of the Interstate pass over rather than under the train tracks, a multi million dollar project created a humongous pumping station to drain the low point.

And you'll never guess this curious detail: It turns out that the water only gets drained out when the pump is actually turned on.

You may have caught network footage a day or two after Katrina of some distracted bozo driving his car into the flooded underpass and being rescued by the tv news crew.

The other night a rainstorm rendered the underpass impassible again. Electric power had still not been restored to the multimillion dollar pumping station. They did have back up generators there-- but they only worked when someone got to the station to turn them on. So, after I-10 was blocked for some 5 hours, a S&WB employee made it to the station to turn on the pump, and it was drained in 3 minutes.

So it goes.