New Orleans utilities to get grilled over Hurricane Francine response
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Mayor LaToya Cantrell thanks her staff during a post-storm press conference on Thursday. Photo: Chelsea Brasted/Axios
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell's first press conference after Hurricane Francine stretched to over an hour in length as law enforcement agent after utility manager after city leader took to the podium to thank each other and congratulate the mayor's leadership team on a job well done.
Why it matters: Not everyone felt so rosy about it.
The latest: A City Council joint Utility, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology and Public Works, Sanitation and Environment committee meeting on Monday will serve as a Hurricane Francine post-mortem, going over in detail what didn't go quite as planned.
- Representatives from Entergy New Orleans, NOLA Ready, the Health Department and the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans are due to present and answer questions.
- The meeting starts at 10am, and you can attend in person at City Hall or watch the livestream.
What he's saying: "Overall, we weathered this storm well due to its low intensity and some critical steps taken to prepare," said Councilman JP Morrell, who chairs the Utility, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology Committee, in a press release.
- "But as we all know, hurricanes are getting stronger and stronger every year, and we can't afford to play defense against a life-changing storm."
Zoom in: In Morrell's statement, issued late Thursday, he laid out several concerns with how Entergy, SWBNO and NOLA Ready communicated with residents.
- Entergy New Orleans, he said, needed to provide more information on "reasonable" timelines for power restoration. It took the utility until Thursday night to share those.
- SWBNO, Morrell said, had "significant gaps in information and communication" about sewerage-related water conservation, pumping capacity and power outages.
- Morrell also described the city's communications on neutral ground parking as a "repeat" problem and unrealistic because it was only cleared after shelter-in-place guidance had already kicked in.
"I think many things [during Francine] worked," SWBNO director Ghassan Korban said Thursday, describing an "all hands on deck, all night long" run for his staff during the storm.
- But "we know for a fact some things didn't go right, and we own up to it."
The intrigue: Some of New Orleans' infrastructure has been upgraded in recent years, thanks to investments to harden the city's power lines and bring the century-old water utility up to modern standards.
- There's still a lot of improvement to make, though, and it's not getting any cheaper.
- Entergy New Orleans and SWBNO, for example, are still asking for millions of dollars to upgrade their systems, and they'll need public and government buy-in to keep getting checks written.
Between the lines: Hurricane Francine was about as rough of a storm as forecasters expected, but the storm's intensity still caught some people off guard, according to Axios' Carlie Kollath Wells.
- "I actually suspect that some of the problem is that many people underestimate what a tropical storm is," University of Miami climatology researcher Brian McNoldy told Axios last week. "You can get a 3-foot storm surge, a foot of rain, 70 mph sustained winds and 95 mph gusts, and that's still a tropical storm."