NEW ORLEANS - In Lake Vista's beautiful neighborhoods, residents say pleasant evenings can be ruined by safety concerns caused by blacked out areas where streetlights are not working.
The Lake Vista Property Owners Association has been begging the city for help since 2006.
"It's been almost three years since we started reporting this, and getting absolutely nowhere," saidSue Garcia of the Lake Vista Property Owners Association. "And we're just tired of it."
Public Works Director Robert Mendoza said, "Lake Vista has a couple of different complications associated with it. We know that the wiring in Lake Vista is very old, as old as the neighborhood itself," he said.
Mendoza said the complications in Lake Vista include the difficulty of replacing old wiring to having access to power. But he said getting these lights repaired is a priority in coming weeks.
"We're actively in Lake Vista and will continue to be in Lake Vista, because it is one of the problem areas, just as we're working the interstates right now, and a few other major systems," Mendoza said.
Garcia just wanted more of a notice.
"It would be nice if we had found this out prior, because we have absolutely no information is from the city whatsoever as to what their timeline is," Garcia said. "It will be extremely important to have this work done."
I gave Mendoza a long list of e-mails and Action Line calls about malfunctioning streetlights citywide that we have received in recent months, and I asked what is slowing down the repair process.
"We have nearly 55,000 streetlights, so we have a pretty big system to maintain," Mendoza explained."The real problem is, what we're really seeing a lot of is a lot more wiring issues than we had before the storm."
Mendoza said just as the crews were catching up with repairs to Katrina damage, Gustav struck.
"Gustav added about a million dollars worth of work to our wiring type and pole type work,which is about six months worth of work," he added. "Of course we had some difficulty until December getting a lot of those crews back, because they had been shipped off to Texas and those other parts of Mississippi to help other utilities actually get power to people's homes."
"It's extremely dangerous, and I'm very concerned about it because my mother lives in this neighborhood," said New Orleans resident Julie Dillon.
Dillon has been trying to get the streetlights around her mother's home repaired since last September, but in this case, Mendoza said crews could not work because of a road construction project in the area.
"Looks like most of that work is wrapping up so we should have access to the wiring that affects that lighting in the next month or so," Mendoza concluded.
Dillon said, "It will make a big difference because myself and my siblings will feel a lot better knowing the block will be illuminated."
Robert Mendoza says the city now has 28 crews working on streetlight problems, including two that were just hired. And he says he is now hoping to get caught up with the backlog as quickly as possible.
"I think we're about two months from finishing the Gustav work from the current list we're looking at," he said."And then it looks like we've got another two months or so of current work that I would call the sort of backlog wiring type work."
As for streetlights that simply burn out, he says those should be replaced within a week.
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