H.J. Bosworth Jr. speaks with WVUE Fox8’s Rob Masson about a new citizens watchdog group that wants to know more about the S&WB’s pumping stations reliability.
Levees.org Sends Open Letter to New Orleans Mayor and City Council
At 12:39 p.m. Thursday August 31, Levees.org sent an open letter to the Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans and also to the New Orleans City Council.
The groups’ founder Sandy Rosenthal and lead researcher H.J. Bosworth Jr had four questions.
These were regarding the Request for Proposals issued on August 14 for a firm that will do a comprehensive analysis of the flood events of July 22, Aug 5 and Aug 8, and also the turbine failure at the S&WB’s Carrollton plant on Aug 9.
For example, Rosenthal and Bosworth note that under Mayor Landrieu’s Executive Order (MJL 10-05), one of the members of the 5-member selection committee is the Chief Administrative Officer. Of course, that individual is Jeff Hebert, who the mayor directed to attend S&WB meetings in his place. This, they feel, is an apparent conflict of interest.
Culprits in Pumps Crisis Will Soon Be Found Out
Scene from pump station 6 in New Orleans on 10-23-07. Photo/AP Alex Brandon
A version of this post appeared in the New Orleans Advocate on Aug 26, 2017 page 4B.
Ever since the flash-flooding on Aug. 5 when a summer rain drenched homes and businesses in New Orleans, I’ve received phone calls every day from distressed callers.
“Should I sell my properties and move away?” they asked. I assured them that the localized drainage crisis is much different from the region-wide levee failure crisis of 12 years ago after Hurricane Katrina.
Analyzing the failure of the federal Army Corps of Engineers’ levees took several years and more than a dozen studies to figure out what went wrong and why. But, analyzing the failure of the local Sewerage & Water Board’s pumping and drainage should take weeks, months at most.
