Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s initial reaction to flooding in Mid-City and Treme during Friday’s flash rainstorm sounded resigned to defeat.
“We are a city that floods,” she said repeatedly.
After the Sewerage & Water Board told Cantrell that pumps at Drainage Pump Station No. 2 on North Broad Street – surrounded by the worst flooding in town – were all operating at full capacity, with uninterrupted power and full personnel, Cantrell told WWL-TV, “This is as good as it gets right now.”
But at a press conference Tuesday, the new mayor’s 16th day in office, she struck a decidedly different tone.
“We can do better, and we will!” she said emphatically.
What changed her assessment? Apparently, she was heartened by millions of dollars in planned drainage improvement projects that have barely advanced in years.
Although the Sewerage & Water Board’s pumps, power and manpower were working “as designed,” according to spokesman Rich Rainey, Cantrell is still trying to get a handle on how City Hall’s portion of the drainage system – catch basins and subsurface drain lines – performed.
“This past Friday’s rain event was a tough one, but you know what? I’m glad that it occurred because it allowed our administration to really gauge a baseline,” she said.
Cantrell said trucks were deployed Friday immediately after the waters receded to check catch basins in the areas that flooded. She said they were not clogged the way they were during last summer’s floods.
But she said her team at the Department of Public Works has not been able to determine whether miles of lateral drainage pipes that connect the catch basins to the pumping stations were clogged or broken.
“They can see inside the drains at Sewerage and Water Board,” she said. “Well, I want that at City Hall!”
Cantrell said a number of underground drain lines that carry water to Pump Station No. 2 are “in the queue” to be fixed using a portion of the $1.7 billion FEMA approved for fixing water, sewer and drainage infrastructure in 2016.
Cantrell spokesman Beau Tidwell said $1.4 billion of that money is for street repairs and $250 million is for associated water and sewer lines.
Former Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s last Public Works director, Dani Galloway, wrote in a transition report for the incoming Cantrell administration that her office lacked staff and resources to tap into that funding. On Tuesday, Cantrell said the federal funding is “bottlenecked.”
Cantrell said she met Friday with officials from FEMA and the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, or GOHSEP, to address those problems. She said she asked FEMA, “Can you please get us several of your employees to work inside the walls of City Hall so we can move these projects through at an expedited fashion? They have been on hold for far too long.”
Indeed, most of that $1.7 billion is money that was granted to the city and Sewerage & Water Board starting shortly after Hurricane Katrina to fix damaged infrastructure. But City Hall and the S&WB had so much trouble coordinating the under-street projects that FEMA had to re-approve the money in a Joint Roads project in 2016.
Landrieu celebrated that as a major milestone of recovery, but then his administration struggled to get projects off the ground.
GOHSEP spokesman Mike Steele said FEMA has not committed to embed staff at City Hall, but has agreed to a series of follow-up meetings to address specific problems with reimbursements.
“Everyone will examine possible staffing needs in the next meetings to see what more can be done,” Steele said. “GOHSEP Chief of Staff Casey Tingle was at the meeting. He says he’s encouraged the mayor is being proactive on these recovery issues.”
Cantrell is also looking at long-term improvements, specifically green infrastructure projects designed to store large amounts of rainfall in retention ponds and underground cisterns, rather than letting it run off into drainage pipes. Federal money from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been approved for that work, but again, the work has been stuck in the design phase.
“We are identifying the subpar design firms who are sluggishly moving our projects forward and we are replacing them,” Cantrell said. “That has to happen.”
WWL-TV asked for a list of those projects that have been delayed or design firms targeted for replacement, but received no response to those questions Tuesday afternoon.