New Orleans Public Service Company

New Orleans Public Service Inc. (NOPSI), also known as NOPSI, was a newly consolidated utility company whose work linked electricity, household health, hospital operations, and public transportation. In the book’s account, its presence appears first as a promise of modern convenience and emergency support, then as part of the infrastructure on which New Orleans’s flood defenses depended. The contrast is significant: electrical systems could protect food and sustain ordinary services, yet a failure in the interconnected city network could sharply restrict the capacity to respond to a disaster.

Utility Services and the Modern Hospital

In 1926, as Baptist opened, NOPSI advertised its installation of Frigidaire electric refrigerators on every floor of the hospital. The advertisement presented stable, low temperatures as protection against food spoilage and the development of germs, and extended the promise beyond the hospital to homes, stores, and restaurants. At a time when many New Orleans homes still used iceboxes, refrigeration represented a visible benefit of the city’s expanding electrical infrastructure. The hospital’s modern conveniences were thus tied not only to medical equipment and building design but also to utility service reaching into its daily operations.

NOPSI’s role at Baptist was distinct from that of the contractor that installed the hospital’s wiring. The book identifies Barnes Electric Construction Co. as responsible for the wiring, while NOPSI supplied the refrigerators. Baptist also had its own power plant, with a smokestack rising seven stories and workers preparing to feed its furnaces 20,000 gallons of oil per week. These details place the hospital within a layered system: it used utility-provided equipment while also maintaining on-site power. The account does not suggest that the refrigerator installation itself determined the hospital’s response to flooding, but it does show how modern hospital operation relied on several forms of infrastructure at once.

The 1926 Flood and Hospital Operations

When floodwater poured into Baptist’s basement, it submerged medical records, groceries, drugs, instruments, linen, the main stove, and dining-room tables. The lights remained on, but the elevators stopped. Firefighters used pumping engines to draw water into the storm sewers; at five thirty the following morning, they could remove water faster than the basement was refilling. Meanwhile, employees and student nurses assembled improvised meals in the small diet kitchens on each floor, apparently drawing on the refrigerators’ supplies.

NOPSI, which also operated the city’s stalled streetcar lines, came quickly to Baptist to replace its gas-powered kitchen. The intervention restored a key service while the hospital was dealing with damage and disrupted operations. The episode places the utility within a practical chain of emergency response: floodwater disabled equipment and filled the basement, firefighters helped clear it, hospital staff improvised meals, and NOPSI replaced the kitchen’s gas power. The hospital’s superintendent subsequently told the New Orleans Item that supplies on each floor would allow normal operations for several weeks or until replacements could be obtained. That reassurance coexisted with an estimated $40,000 to $60,000 in damage and the destruction of hundreds of unprotected cases of drugs and supplies.

The 1927 Storm and the City’s Power Network

The following spring, extreme rainfall struck as floodwater was already moving down the Mississippi toward the Gulf. In less than twenty-four hours, New Orleans received 14.01 inches of rain. Around midnight, lightning brought down a 13,000-volt NOPSI high-tension line where it crossed the main feeder wires for the city’s drainage system. The resulting spark short-circuited the drainage plant’s switching system, damaged a submarine cable distributing electricity, and burned out one of the two 6,000-kilowatt generators serving drainage and sewage operations as well as high-lift water pumps that supplied reserve water to the fire department.

The wires were repaired quickly, but the damaged generator coils would take weeks to replace. The city therefore faced the record rainfall with a patched power line and only half its normal power supply. When the mayor and other authorities went to the accident site the next morning to seek additional power from NOPSI, they discovered that the utility’s system and the drainage plant operated at different frequencies: 60 hertz and 25 hertz. Without an appropriate transformer, power could not be transferred. The account describes a technical incompatibility, not a refusal by NOPSI to assist. The mayor’s car then failed in rising water, leaving him stranded as the emergency spread.

Infrastructure, Dependency, and Disaster

NOPSI’s appearances in these episodes mark different points in the relationship between utility systems and public safety. At Baptist, refrigerators and a rapid kitchen-power replacement supported hospital operations through a flood. In 1927, the failure of a line at the intersection of the utility’s network and the drainage system contributed to a cascade of electrical damage, while the mismatch between power frequencies prevented a proposed transfer of electricity. NOPSI also operated streetcars, which were stalled during the flooding, showing that the same emergency affected transportation as well as power.

The contrast is not simply between a helpful company and a failed city system. The events show how much depended on infrastructure that ordinarily remained in the background: refrigeration, power distribution, drainage, pumping, and transit. When those connections worked, they could sustain food storage or restore a hospital kitchen; when they were damaged or incompatible, emergency response narrowed. The book presents NOPSI as part of that material network, whose capacities and limits shaped what hospitals and city authorities could do when water overwhelmed ordinary operations.