NOLA.com: 1.2-inch rain burns out three drainage pumps
Gibbons Burke
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1.2-inch rain burns out three drainage pumps
By Bruce Nolanand Michelle Krupa
Staff writers
An unremarkable 1.2-inch rainfall burned up three
massive Sewerage & Water Board pumps Wednesday,
officials said, underscoring the needs of a vast
municipal drainage system that still requires
almost $40 million in post-Katrina work and has
received little public attention, even as
much-publicized levee repairs have been racing
forward for months.
The pumps, among the largest in the city’s unique
drainage system, were located at stations in
Lakeview, Gentilly and Mid-City, but no flooding
was reported, officials said.
Like scores of similar pumps in the complex
system, the burned out units were driven by huge
electric motors that sat partly submerged in
saltwater for as long as three weeks after
Hurricane Katrina struck the city Aug. 29. The
motors burned up when insulation failed as they
began to turn under a normal operating load, said
Joseph Sullivan, the S&WB’s general
superintendent. Wednesday’s rain was the first
significant precipitation in what has been an
unusually dry year.
The three pumps are located at stations on the
17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal and
North Broad Street. Sullivan said they are now
off-line until they can be repaired. Their huge
motors, some producing as must as 2,500
horsepower, will be rewound by hand with new
copper wiring, a complex operation that can take
more than a month, Sullivan said.
The pumps' failure, just over a month before the
start of hurricane season, raises questions as to
the reliability of a post-Katrina system that S&WB
officials said can drain about 16 percent less
water than before the storm.
Whether the city’s system today is basically
robust — or riddled with unreliable, salt-damaged
pump motors — is a matter of dispute between S&WB
officials and members of the Broadmoor Improvement
Association, which has been monitoring the board’s
progress as part of its post-Katrina planning
process.
Water board officials said they believe the
drainage system is basically sound. And they point
out that the Corps of Engineers is preparing a $40
million bundle of contracts to rewind every pump
motor that sat in saltwater, among other repairs.
Executive Director Marcia St. Martin compared the
rewinding to planned maintenance on an old
automobile, rather than a matter of urgent repair.
“Taking it out of service and repairing will
insure its reliability. But that doesn’t not
equate it to being unreliable today,” she said
Sullivan said the New Orleans drainage system
today can handle a continuous rain of half-an-inch
per hour, compared with sixth-tenths of an inch
per hour before the Katrina. The difference
derives the loss of several pumps to the storm,
notwithstanding the failure of the three pumps
Wednesday, he said.
“The basic system is up to its normal operating
standard,” said Sullivan.
But Matt McBride, a mechanical engineer with pump
expertise who monitors flood protection for the
Broadmoor group, said pump motors that sat in
saltwater are unreliable and should have been
placed on an aggressive repair schedule months
ago.
“Why did everyone rewire their house after the
storm? Because the wiring was shot after being
underwater for two weeks. That’s as basic as I can
put it,” McBride said.
“This is the equivalent of throwing a toaster in
the lake, pulling it out two weeks later, and
thinking that because you dried off with a
hair-dryer the toaster won’t catch fire. I don’t
think anyone in industry would accept that.”
McBride said the Broadmoor group will present
findings today to members of the City Council and
neighborhood groups, as well as candidates vying
for office in a May 20 city election.
“This cuts across all party lines and all
demographic groups,” said McBride. “All of us want
to stay dry.”
After flooding receded in the weeks after Katrina,
S&WB employees worked on a breakneck schedule to
clean and dry the huge electric motors at a cost
of about $65 million, Sullivan said. He said
technicians tested motors for internal short
circuits, but those tests could not reveal how the
motors would hold up under hours of normal
operating load.
In calculating its pumping capacity on hand, the
S&WB considers those pumps reliable “until the
time they fail,” Sullivan said. Because they are
ingeniously simple devices, their failure is not
easily predicted, he said.
Sullivan and St. Martin said that after Katrina
the water board did not — and still does not —
have the money to begin shipping motors out to be
rewound and have bearings replaced. That job now
falls to the Corps, which will pick up the cost as
part of the $40 million in contracts it is
preparing for bid.
The Corps’ Task Force Guardian, charged with
restoring the area’s hurricane protection to
pre-Katrina levels by June 1, recently posted a
document to its Web site listing 61 pumps needing
work at 23 pumping stations.
The three that failed Wednesday were on the list.
The pumps needing work provide most of the city’s
total pumping capacity. In many cases, those pumps
slated for repair — or in the S&WB’s view,
maintenance — provide the bulk of the pumping
capacity in any given station.
For instance, all of the pumps at Pumping Station
No. 3 on the London Avenue Canal need work. And
pumps needing work produce 86 percent of the
pumping at the massive Pumping Station No. 6 on
the 17th Street Canal, which drains Broadmoor,
Carrollton and part of Old Metairie, among other
areas.
According to S&WB documents, only nine of the
city’s 23 manned pump stations now can operate at
pre-Katrina levels. Two small stations — one near
the Hammond Highway bridge and the other in an
undeveloped part of eastern New Orleans — are
offline entirely, the records show.
St. Martin downplayed the effect of an inoperable
or severely compromised pump station on any given
area. “A lot of (water) could be redirected from
one part of town to another,” she said. “Zero
capacity does not mean that the area is not
served.”
Case in point: Pump Station No. 12, which sits at
Pontchartrain and Robert E. Lee boulevards and
moves a maximum 1,000 cubic feet per second out of
Lakeview neighborhoods.
Since Katrina, Station No. 12 has been offline.
But in its absence, S&WB officials say the
rainwater it typically drains would flow south,
parallel to the 17th Street Canal, down Fleur de
Lis Drive. It eventually would be siphoned by Pump
Station No. 6, which straddles the canal, and
pumped into the lake, St. Martin said.
In affixing a $39.6 million price tag to the load
of repairs required at pump stations citywide, the
corps has proposed projects at 24 sites — all 23
manned pump stations, plus an electrical station
on Earhart Boulevard.
The most expensive job is Pump Station No. 17, a
massive facility on Florida Avenue near Franklin
Avenue, about a mile west of the Industrial Canal.
According to corps documents, two feet of flooding
damaged a pair of pump motors, electrical switch
equipment, a large discharge line and the building
itself. Repairs are expected to cost $7.5 million.
Sullivan, however, discounted the necessity of
some of the repairs catalogued by the corps. For
instance, in one case — the Interstate 10
Underpass Station — the corps calls for bearings
in three pumps to be replaced because raw water,
rather than potable water, was used to lubricate
them when the city’s water purification system
failed.
But Sullivan said no tests have been conducted to
show that the dirty water did any harm to the
bearings. “That isn’t proven yet,” Sullivan said.
“That is not a proven fact.”
McBride said the Corps is “totally culpable” for
not hustling the pump repairs with the same energy
it is pushing levee repairs around the region.
The task force’s mission statement posted on its
website says Corps “will assess damages to the
publicly owned hurricane and flood protection
systems, including pumping stations, and consider/
provide recommended repairs by mid-January 2006.”
But Jim St. Germain, the Corps official working on
pump station rehabilitation, said “there wasn’t a
mission to re-establish all the interior drainage
capacity by June 1.
“We’ve been getting approvals, getting funding,
putting out the work for bids, but we never set
the goal to have all the pumping stations
repairded by June 1,” he said.
In fact, all the pump work is not slated to be
finished until September 2007, more than two years
after Katrina, and not a single corps contract has
yet been let, St. Martin said.
By contrast, neighboring Jefferson Parish has been
able to fix its 22 manned pump stations, Drainage
Department Director Kazem Alikhani said.
“Everything is 100 percent,” he said. “All the
pumps are operational.”
To begin, Jefferson’s problems never came close to
matching the catastrophe in New Orleans, Alikhani
said. Even as neighborhoods on both banks
succumbed to street flooding, the drainage system
only ever was down as much as 15 percent from its
capacity.
Further, Jefferson was able to finance millions of
dollars of its own repairs, though now the parish
is waiting to find out whether FEMA and the corps
will honor its requests for reimbursement, he
said.
“Thank God we’re not in a position that New
Orleans is,” Alikhani said. “We had some equipment
that was damaged. We were just blessed that we
didn’t go through the problem that our neighbor
went through.”
(Bruce Nolan can be reached at
bno...@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3344)