Ida once again shines the light on infrastructure inadequacies

By the Wednesday following Hurricane Ida, desperate people gathered outside of the Whole Foods Market on Magazine Street, attempting to charge their depleted cell phones on the store’s generator and tap into the only Wi-Fi working Uptown.  As they strived to make contact with the outside world, they grumbled,  “The levees killed us during Katrina; Entergy killed us during Ida.”

The assembled sweaty crowd mostly questioned Entergy’s logic on placing the main power conduit into the city upon a tower which crossed one of the largest rivers on Earth.  In fact, they queried, why did New Orleans continue to maintain above-ground electrical wires when other cities susceptible to windstorms had long since buried their cables?  

In the power company’s defense, eight separate power transfer conduits failed, a catastrophic disaster that even few hurricane recovery prognosticators ever foresaw.   Still, stated purpose of keeping Entergy New Orleans as a separate corporation from the rest of Louisiana was to fulfill the promise that NOPSI once held—that Orleans would maintain contingency power sources on the East Bank sufficient to fuel the parish in case of a catastrophic failure in the cross-river lines.

This is not to say that the efforts by Entergy fell anything short of Herculean — in their attempts to bring online the recently constructed New Orleans Power Station at Michoud —and link it to power lines in Slidell.  An Entergy New Orleans VP indicated to Councilwoman At-Large Helena Moreno the necessity of running powerlines across Lake Pontchartrain in order to power the city grid.  However, as she noted, “NOPS is 128MW plant. The amount of power being shown on [electric grid] map is much less than that. It may be because the distribution lines (small wires within the city) may be too damaged to carry power thru. [I] Haven’t had my questions answered, but hope to know more soon.”

In other words, the new New Orleans East Power Plant should have generated sufficient electricity to power the City of New Orleans (and possibly the entire East Bank including Jefferson Parish) by itself.  NOPS alone should have answered the exact self-sufficiency criticism posed above. In theory, Entergy New Orleans did construct a degree of energy independence for the city, but the storm came just as the power company was testing the new facility.  However, the idea that Ida came a few weeks too early falls short as a justification, if Entergy also needed to run lines across the Chef Pass from Slidell.

Maintaining parish-based reserve power made a real qualitative difference in areas that experienced the brunt of the storm. Contrast Orleans Parish with Iberville Electric Company, which focuses on that Parish solely.  (Unlike NOPSI, that Independent entity was never merged into a larger multi-state corporation.)  Less than 24 hours after Ida, it had the electrical grid back online utilizing power generation resources in Iberville Parish.  

The irony is, even with the current power generation system, Entergy could have avoided much of the catastrophic system failure— if only our central powerlines were relocated underground, as they are in many cities.  That’s not to say that New Orleans would not have endured extraordinary damage no matter how the Entergy grid had been designed. “One-hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour winds are going to be roughshod  on any infrastructure that they hit,” said Joshua Rhodes, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, in an interview with USA Today.  

Still, some of the same engineering questions that the city pondered about the levee system after Katrina have now led some experts and regulators to question if transmission lines should be above or below ground?

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, advocates for undergrounding. “One thing we should do and that I’ll be pushing for is to make sure we start going underground with as much of our power infrastructure as possible,” Carter told USA Today Network last Tuesday as he surveyed the damage from a U.S Coast Guard plane. 

Sixteen years ago, Katrina hit the city as just a category one storm.  Most of that Hurricane’s high winds fell upon the Gulf Coast, not us, yet power lines still fell all over New Orleans.  Entergy responded by clear cutting the tops of oak trees and other parts of the tree-canopy in order to replace the existing lines.  At no time did Entergy New Orleans present serious plans, or even court real discussions, on the notion of placing that new electrical network below the streets.  

Not only would undergrounding power lines more adequately fit the historical character of this city, but it would protect electrical transference amidst high winds.  Even complaints that some areas of New Orleans consistently flood, fall short, when it is equally true that the most historic sections of the city—from the Bywater to Audubon Park, from the Esplanade Ridge to the Gentilly Ridge—mostly sit above sea level.  (The same could be said for Jefferson Parish along the Metairie Ridge.)

The levee system held thanks to a $14.5 billion investment over the last decade. New Orleans and South Louisiana has a rare chance to convince the federal government to help move our electrical lines below ground as an emergency measure, thanks to the infrastructure bill championed by the Pelican State’s own US Senator Bill Cassidy.  A simple addendum onto that legislation could help underwrite such an effort, but only if the leadership at Entergy New Orleans (and perhaps the parent operation) loudly express the need.

This article originally published in the September 6, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.