As Hurricane Katrina rumbled toward landfall on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi on August 29, 2005, Robert Moeinian, pumping station superintendent for the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (S&WBNO), got prepared: “I put together a few days’ supply of food, grabbed a few changes of clothes, and met my crew at the I-10 pumping station.”
Anticipating “A Few Days'” Work
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony on June 1, 2004, the start of that year’s hurricane season, the I-10 pumping station became the most recent addition to the S&WBNO’s lineage of powerful drainage pumping stations dating back to the turn of the century. From its location at the I-10 highway underpass, this newly minted wonder of technology, equipped with fully automated self-cleaning rubbish and debris rakes, was capable of pumping 360,000 gallons of water per minute out of the city of New Orleans. This capacity plus that of the 21 other major pumping stations and 11 smaller stations across the city allowed the S&WBNO to lower stormwater levels a dramatic 1 inch the first hour of a downpour, and 0.5 inch per hour for each subsequent hour of operation.
Before Katrina, the National Weather Service predicted that a storm such as Katrina would deluge the city with 12 to 16 inches of rain as it passed through. Moeinian confirms this prediction: “Typically, with this kind of rainfall you’d find localized flooding in low-lying areas around the city, but the drainage system would kick on and start pumping the water into the lake, and a few days’ pumping would do the job.”
Moeinian settled in with his two colleagues at the station anticipating a few busy days mechanically draining the rainwater from his sector of the city. In a couple of days, he thought, it would all be pumped up and over the levees, safely ensconced in Lake Pontchartrain. By Labor Day, the memory of a few long days and nights spent at work might be the subject of passing conversation at a backyard barbecue.
A Terrible, Surprising Reality
Moeinian recalls tense moments in the control room of the concrete and steel superstructure, which was wrenched by 140-mph winds. “When the storm hit, you could feel the building shake,” he says. Across town at another pumping station, winds blasted ancient, heavy wooden doors from their hinges. It took several struggling attendants to hold the doors back in place, shutting out the wind and rain. At yet another station, a small fire broke out as horizontal rains doused electrical components through a shattered window. Operators subdued the flames with fire extinguishers.
Through it all, Moeinian says, “The staff in all 22 of the attended pumping stations held fast to their posts.”
After the storm passed, most of the city was without power and telephone service. Even cell phone connections were sporadic or nonexistent. But Moeinian was confident the pumps at the I-10 station and the 21 other stations dotting the canals and catch basins throughout the city would keep turning. Powered by the Sewerage and Water Board’s independent power generating facility through underground conduit, or supplied with their own onsite diesel power, they continued to march billions of gallons of collected rainwater and storm runoff toward central collection stations and over the levees into Lake Pontchartrain.
In the calm after Katrina, it appeared that the city would soon be drained and back to normal. Then Superintendent Moeinian began to notice something unusual. “The pumps were working fine–everything was working normally–but what started to bother me was the water levels kept rising when they should have been dropping. I started wondering, where is all this water coming from? But we continued pumping.”
And the waters kept rising. Finally, as the waters rose to mere inches from the 6,000-V power supply that motivated the huge pumps, Moeinian, to avoid the risk of electric shock or damage to the equipment, ordered power cut-off to the motors. The station fell silent.
“We still had communications over 800-megahertz radio and connections with both the city and the Office of Emergency Preparedness,” he explains. Over those airwaves, Moeinian learned that a helicopter inspection had revealed the levees had failed; water was rushing into New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain. “From that time on, we stayed at the pumping station using our radios to help to coordinate rescues of our personnel throughout the city. We were there until Thursday, three days after the storm, making sure everyone was OK.”
However, when the three-man crew emerged from the station, even they had to be rescued by boat and ferried to safety. Later, Moeinian heard stories of crews from other pumping stations who “simply had to swim for it through turbulent floodwaters, dragging coworkers who could not swim aboard makeshift rafts.” The Lower Ninth Ward pumping station had been virtually washed away. Miraculously though, of the 100 people attending to pumping station duties throughout the storm and its aftermath, all had survived.
In the words of US Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Dave Pezza, the 500-year storm had arrived, and “it was a storm like no other.”
As he and his crew were retreating to the Algiers Water Treatment Plant, one of the few assets of the S&WBNO that had escaped major damage, Moeinian learned the staggering news that 80% of the city was now under water.
A Place Like No Other
New Orleans holds a place of distinction among American cities for many reasons, not the least of which is its elevation. It is the only city in the United States that is below sea level, with its mean elevation being 8 feet below sea level. The city is situated in a saucer-shaped depression. Its highest elevations are along the banks of the Mississippi River, where the contours of the land rise to about 12 feet, and along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, about 4 feet above sea level. In other words, “It’s a city that’s not supposed to be here,” says Gordon Austin, chief of environmental quality for the S&WBNO. “But it is here, and it’s a vital part of the American economy.”
From the city’s inception in the late 1700s, “It has been dependent for its existence on the levees walling out the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain,” says Austin.
An early ordinance required landowners to build and maintain these levees in order to establish and hold title to their lands. This ordinance promoted settlement and development, but it was also the opening salvo in a series of pitched battles with the sea.
As the city grew, periodic floods brought their attendant problems of disease, inconvenience, and death. Through the 19th century, travelers tried to avoid New Orleans, as it was not considered healthy or safe. Even firefighting was compromised by the habitually soggy earth, as fire wagons would become helplessly mired while fires raged nearby. City officials were convinced of the need to develop a workable drainage system.
Austin describes how in 1895, after several false starts, such a system was devised. “It was a drainage system essentially designed to protect lives and property and to prepare the way for development of the city,” he says. “Considerations such as water quality and environmental impact, which only later became an issue, were not then taken into account.”
The drainage system developed by the S&WBNO in 1895 and deployed at the turn of the century remains today essentially unchanged, save for modifications to keep pace with the city’s growth and implement technological advancements. It now comprises 90 miles of open canals and 90 miles of subsurface canals, centralized collection points, and numerous pumping facilities. Management of this vast waterworks falls on the shoulders of the men and women of the Sewerage and Water Board. “We have a great responsibility,” says Austin. “We’re responsible for every drop of water that falls on this city. Without these pumps there’s no such thing as drainage. There is nowhere for the water to run off. Every drop of rain has to be pumped up and out, and that’s why we’re here.”
The system works and has successfully defended the city for more than a century.
But nothing could contain the forces that had now come into play.
Too Much Water…and Not Enough
Aerial inspection of the levee system after Hurricane Katrina revealed five or six major breaches along the floodwalls. One of the breaches would eventually measure 600 feet. The tidal surges on Lake Pontchartrain had enjoyed free reign over the city and its inhabitants. Thousands of homes were swept away, lives were lost, and for several desperate days food, shelter, and security were a constant preoccupation of the remaining survivors as they sought a means of escape. But in a city full of mangled gas pipelines and downed electrical wires dangling in the mud, there was, according to Austin, no need more urgent than that for water. This pressing need for water was, surprisingly, not for the purposes an outside observer would imagine. “We urgently needed to restore water pressure to the system not so much for drinking as for fighting the fires that could break out at any time and any place.”
With most of its critical infrastructure incapacitated, one treatment plant completely submerged, and power-generating capacity wiped out by floodwaters, the restoration of water pressure in the distribution system became the S&WBNO’s top priority, Austin says.
But the Sewerage and Water Board also had sustained massive losses in human capital; the staff was “cut in half across all levels, from financial administration to field service technical personnel,” says Robert Jackson, director of community relations for the S&WBNO. “Nearly the entire fleet of S&WBNO vehicles had been demolished; 80% of the workers who had stayed on to work were now without homes; and a mammoth rescue and repair task lay before them.” The S&WBNO needed help.
For Austin and the board, a paradox emerged. “We had offers of help from all over, but our problem was 80% of the housing was gone and we had no facilities to accommodate any of the workers who might respond.”
Help From Distant Shores
One request from the S&WBNO caught the attention of city officials almost 3,000 miles away. Trisha Knoll, director of Public Information for the Portland Water Bureau in Portland, OR, recalls how it began. “We had heard almost all of their vehicles were destroyed and they urgently needed valve trucks to restore water pressure. We were in a position to offer one. We also asked them what else they might need, which was basically everything. When we told them we’d bring our own tents, that clinched the deal.
“Additionally,” Knoll continues, “the Portland city council was willing to authorize $1 million in emergency funding to support the effort.” Louisiana and Oregon agreed to enter into an Emergency Management Assistance Compact. According to the arrangement, Oregon would provide the requested emergency aid, and in turn Louisiana would reimburse Oregon for its assistance using funds later acquired through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
On October 8, 2005, a convoy of 18 trucks carrying 35 men and women equipped with Meals Ready to Eat, tents, and provisions for 30 days’ stay in a sweltering swamp arrived from Portland and pitched camp at the Algiers treatment facility.
As part of the arrangement, the staff from the Portland Water Bureau would also provide comprehensive damage assessments for the Sewerage and Water Board. According to sources at the Portland Water Bureau, that agency would provide trained Damage Assessment Teams (DATs) consisting of trained engineering staff who would assess S&WBNO assets. They would prepare reports documenting damages in order to begin the S&WBNO’s FEMA claim processing.
Meanwhile, the US Army Corps of Engineers, who had begun pumping floodwaters from the city shortly after the hurricane, sought to facilitate the reopening of the S&WBNO’s own pumping stations to allow the truly massive amounts of water to be drained off. Corps project leader Frederick Young points out that “although the corps efforts were highly visible,” it would take getting the pumping stations back into operation to make any practical dent in drying out the city. He said the corps had deployed numerous transportable pumps, but “our biggest pumps have a capacity of 100 cubic feet per second–miniscule compared to what the city’s 60-cycle, 1,000-cubic-foot-per-second pumping stations can do.”
Young describes how the corps and the contractors assigned to work with it drained the areas around the stations to allow repair crews to begin rehabilitating the equipment within the stations themselves. “We would go to one area, pump until it was dry, then walk down the street to the next pumping station and set up to pump there. We sometimes pumped from the intake side to the outfall side of an existing station to bypass disabled pumps.” He adds, “We’ll probably keep some of the temporary pumps running at the most seriously damaged pump stations until the stations themselves can be repaired.”
And there was help from private industry. According to a September 11, 2005, Times-Picayune article, General Electric Corp., which had existing contracts with the city, promised to expedite repair or replacement of any electrical component needed by the S&WBNO to rebuild is power system, compressing the usual production and delivery time frame from a year to just months. Entergy, the local utility, also prioritized electrical power restoration for the S&WBNO.
From across the Atlantic, the government of Germany dispatched a corps of youth volunteers along with equipment and supplies, which impressed Moeinian. “They came to get the job done. They worked alongside us at the Sewerage and Water Board and anywhere else where they were needed.”
Dry City
Even after the Corps of Engineers declared the city dry on October 11, 2005–a date that was weeks earlier than the one they had initially projected–there was still much work to be done. At each facility, Sewerage and Water Board technicians, assisted by the DATs from the Portland Water Bureau, began examining each piece of damaged gear. Many of the components had been submerged for weeks in brackish, corrosive water sloshed in from Lake Pontchartrain.
Trisha Knoll was on hand as technicians from two ends of the country converged on the complexes of pumps and dynamos. “They stripped down each motor, replacing components that could not be restored; then they resealed the windings and constructed a vault, which would be used as an oven to bake out the remaining moisture at 250 degrees,” she describes. “After that, they painstakingly rebuilt the motors, varnished them, tested them, and returned them to their housings.” The process, Knoll says, was repeated at each damaged facility.
The City of New Orleans has the largest complex of pumping infrastructure in the world. The teams from Portland were impressed by the divergence between their respective systems. In Portland, drainage is entrusted to gravity; in New Orleans, it relies on pumps. On a Web log (www.portlandonline.com/water) initiated by the DATs to keep in touch with the Portland community, the Portland employees expressed admiration for one piece of equipment in particular: the Wood Screw Pump. Invented in 1914 by A.B. Wood, a S&WBNO employee, it is 14 feet in diameter and for decades was considered the largest pump in the world; it has only recently been surpassed by a similar installation in Kyoto, Japan. It was this machine’s pumping power that made modern-day New Orleans possible.
On the night of November 4, 2005, at the tent city headquarters of the Portland Water Bureau at the Algiers treatment facility, a small desktop copier churned out reams of documents. These were the detailed damage reports to be filed with the S&WBNO and FEMA for federal emergency reimbursement funds.
“We had to use a home copier,” recalls Knoll. “We didn’t have the space for a big unit the size of a car, and we were up until midnight making copies–everything had to be in triplicate and there were 600 separate reports. The next day, one day before our scheduled return to Portland, we stacked the reports on a hand-truck and delivered them to the Sewerage and Water Board offices.”
These documents revealed the scope of the damage to the city’s sewer, drainage, and water systems. They reported that service teams of water operations mechanics, apprentices, utility workers, and equipment operators had responded to 136 work orders for main breaks, service leaks, broken valves, and broken fire hydrants. This workload required two service teams to work 15-hour days, six days a week, completing six or seven repair orders per day. At the time of this writing, assessments are still ongoing. The figures for repair and rebuilding costs are not yet available for S&WBNO’s facilities.
The DATs have assessed and prepared reports regarding the following:
- More than 500 flooded S&WBNO fleet vehicles, most damaged beyond repair
- Two treatment plants–one wastewater and one drinking water
- Four water intake structures and 95 pumping stations
- The central office, which flooded, and which contained billing, administration, and customer service functions for the S&WBNO
- 38 leaking mains, services, and hydrants
These damages are listed in just the first installment of the report. Many facilities throughout the city’s hardest-hit areas have yet to be assessed.
A Knowledge Base
The first Oregon team departed after 30 days in New Orleans, and its replacement team arrived the next day from Portland to continue the work the first team had begun. Moeinian expressed gratitude for the assistance already received. “They were so helpful to us. Though our systems are different, we spoke the same language,” he says. Moeinian adds that the Portland team’s knowledge of FEMA reporting requirements was especially helpful. “I asked them how they got to be so knowledgeable about FEMA, and one of the guys told me it was because of the earthquakes they have up there. They live on a serious fault line, so they learned out of necessity. They shared a lot of their knowledge with us. I think if in the future there’s another community that needs help in a disaster somewhere, some of us from the S&WBNO will be prepared to go and to help in the same way we were helped.”
Heroes
Gordon Austin has praise for S&WBNO employees who stayed on to work in spite of harrowing conditions. “They risked their lives to save others. We got the city dried out in half the time the Corps of Engineers first predicted. We’ve got secondary treatment at our wastewater plant. We got drinking water back by early October, and in two to three weeks we’ll be able to supply the whole city–it’s almost miraculous.”
Austin further predicts that “by February or March I’m confident that we’ll have stormwater pumping up to 100%. We have a very dedicated staff of long-term employees who know the level of their responsibility is the health and safety of our families and our communities. Even though many of the people working for the Sewerage and Water Board have lost everything, morale has been high. They’ve been through some tough times, but they’re still here.”
The dedication of these workers also received official acknowledgment. The Times-Picayune reported that upon the return of clean drinking water to many parts of the city, the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, honored the Sewerage and Water Board and its employees with formal recognition of their sacrifice and acts of heroism. Many of them had stayed on the job through the harrowing night of the storm and had, from that moment on, worked continuously on rescue and recovery efforts. Living in improvised accommodations at S&WBNO facilities, they worked on 24-hour shifts for up to 15 days straight. Just two months after the catastrophe, the repairs they had made and the work they had accomplished were making it possible for residents displaced by the deluge of August to begin to trickle back into the city of New Orleans and begin rebuilding their lives.
A little over a month after the disasters of Katrina and Rita, the S&WBNO’s cadre of water professionals, augmented by delegations from Portland, Lafayette, LA, and elsewhere, set up a list of priorities for moving steadily from station to station to make repairs. When Moeinian was finally able to return to inspect some of the ravaged stations from which he and his colleagues had so narrowly escaped in the hours after the storm, he was heartbroken.
“There was trash everywhere–bicycle parts, dead fish, debris, mud. It was a thing of pride that we had always kept these places neat, clean, spotless. When we gave tours people would often be surprised at how clean we kept it.”
But Moeinian remains undaunted. “You know, we’re going to fix it. It’s going to be fine, and what we can’t fix we’ll replace. These pumps have been around a hundred years and they’ll be around a hundred more–they’re designed that way.”
Evaluating the Aftereffects
While hopes are high at the time of this writing, the situation in New Orleans is by no means resolved. With the rescue phase of the crisis evolving steadily toward a recovery process, Gordon Austin traveled to Washington, DC, in early November 2005 and shared his insights and experiences with the 20,000 water professionals gathered in the nation’s capital for the annual meeting of the Water Environment Federation, WEFTEC ’05. At a special session organized by the federation, entitled “In the Wake of Hurricanes,” Austin joined panelists from the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LADEQ), among others, to discuss damage assessments, progress reports, and prospects for those areas hit hard by the storms. A major focus of the discussions centered on returning the communities to viability. A chief concern in that regard was the possible environmental impacts of the storms on the region.
Dire Predictions
In the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina, media images of survivors sloshing through the muck raised concern. Because of the force of the surge from Lake Pontchartrain, homes had been swept from their foundations. Sewer lines were torn apart, and floodwaters submerged the treatment plant. Water from the normally separate wastewater and stormwater systems mixed with untreated sewage and lake water and flowed through the streets. There was obviously some level of risk in entering these waters, but there was no way to tell just how much long-term risk these waters posed for the environment. Albert Hindrichs, staff scientist for the LADEQ, who was among the panelists, says that when the enormity of the Katrina catastrophe struck there were other priorities beyond sampling and testing for water quality: “Normally, we have specific staff people who go out in boats to designated points on the canals and the lake to sample water for analysis, but when the hurricane hit, our boats and personnel and resources became part of the rescue mission. They pitched in wherever they could, ferrying stranded survivors to safety.”
During this time, he says, dire reports emerged that Lake Pontchartrain would be turned into a “toxic witches’ brew” of chemical and biological pollutants, and that the future of the lake was in peril. According to Hindrichs, that has in fact turned out not to be the case. “Those early observers lacked data,” he says. Furthermore, he reports that “when LADEQ resumed sampling originally at 12 sites on September 6, 2005, we did record elevated levels of coliform bacteria as well as reduced oxygen levels. These were exactly the results one would expect in the aftermath of a hurricane.”
Nevertheless, he says the LADEQ “quickly expanded sampling.” By October 18, LADEQ and contract labs had collected 2,732 samples and had performed more than 45,000 analyses of organic compounds, conventional contaminants, and metals. In spite of the elevated levels at the beginning of the testing period, by late October conditions seemed to be moving toward normal. “Overall the indications were quite positive for the lake,” says Hindrichs, adding that “dissolved oxygen, fecal coliforms, and turbidity all met water-quality standards. Very few samples had detectable organic compounds or metals, and we found only five instances out of 3,000 where chronic aquatic life standards were exceeded.”
He also reports that “there were no algae blooms to indicate excessive nutrient levels, and the fish kills that had been observed were a normal consequence of low oxygen levels typical in runoff after major storm activity.” Overall, he says, “The lake is fine,” which he says could possibly be attributed in part to the effect of dilution.
“The floodwaters pumped into the lake from New Orleans would have amounted to less than 5% of the lake’s pre-storm volume; sewage and other contaminants would have accounted for less than 1% of that.” Furthermore, Hindrichs says, “During the relatively gradual unwatering effort, many potential contaminants may have volatilized off or simply settled out to remain behind in the sediments carpeting New Orleans.”
The Fight Continues
These sediments and the tons of debris left behind will become an ongoing concern for the recovery. “The amount of debris is staggering,” says Yarrow Etheredge, another member of the WEFTEC special panel. She is director of public and legal affairs for Toxicological & Environmental Associates Inc., a bioremediation firm specializing in innovative approaches to waste management.
Etheredge explains the New Orleans scenario: “In a normal year New Orleans must dispose of 2 million tons of waste, but this storm alone created over 22 million tons of debris.” She says this fact has people concerned. “No one knows what’s in the debris, what the hazards might be, or how or where it will be disposed.” Etheredge says finding innovative solutions to the disposal issue may be required to preserve the environment, and adds that “solutions to these issues should be considered in future emergency management planning.”
Even the agency that dried out the city after the hurricanes is facing challenges posed by the mounds of shattered tree limbs, smashed vehicles, and toppled structures. According to Austin, debris removal contractors have simply “scooped up hydrants, water mains, and sewer lines along with the rubble with their cranes and earthmovers.” He says this has forced staff from the S&WBNO to once again crisscross the city to make repairs.
At the once pristine pumping stations, refuse captured by the intake rakes and screens has been piling up. “Where normally we would have been able to get rid of it as soon as it came off the rakes, we now have to stack it and store it until our processing facility comes back online,” says Austin.
Austin sees another challenge facing the S&WBNO since the storms: drought. As of mid-November, it had not rained appreciably in the New Orleans area since Hurricane Rita in mid-September. Incredibly, now it is the lack of water that threatens the S&WBNO’s infrastructure. Austin says the dryness “could result in soil shrinkage and subsidence, further jeopardizing water and sewer pipes previously destabilized by the flooding.”
Nevertheless, in mid-November, Austin was optimistic. “The city has the spirit; people are already talking about Mardi Gras.” He laments the losses suffered by so many people, especially in St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward where, he says, “The devastation is not something you can comprehend until you see it firsthand.” But he has conviction that “recovery is under way. You can see it all around.”
The nearby communities are acting as the staging areas. “People are buying their materials there, lodging there while they commute to repair their homes.” Although no one knows what the future may hold, projections of a post-flood New Orleans with a population of 250,000 people–half the population prior to the flood–seem realistic to Austin.
With his more than 30 years’ experience at the Sewerage and Water Board, Austin’s confidence is a reflection of the long-standing spirit of the Crescent City. “By the spring I’m sure we’ll all have our Katrina stories, but the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans will be sound, and we’ll be here to serve our citizens when they come back home.”
