New Orleans Sewer and Water Board

The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans built, maintained, and operated the city’s drainage system, placing it at the center of repeated disputes over flooding and public investment. The Board could pump immense volumes of water, but its equipment and canals could not guarantee protection against the most severe storms. Its history in the account is therefore one of measurable engineering effort and known limits: warnings and proposals preceded major floods, while subsequent improvements still left parts of the city vulnerable.

Mandate and limits

The Board was responsible for drains, catch basins, pumping stations, and the wider drainage system, not for the city’s levees. That boundary did not insulate its work from levee performance: failures along the levee system could impede the drainage of water already inside the city. George G. Earl, the Board’s longtime general superintendent, argued that New Orleans needed higher, stronger levees as well as improvements to drainage.

The Board’s system faced a larger geographic problem. Earl anticipated that the city would grow as transportation companies made increasing use of the nation’s interior waterways. He also warned that development could wall off land that had absorbed occasional overflows from Lake Pontchartrain, potentially raising the lake’s water level. The drainage challenge thus involved not just the capacity of pumps, but the changing relationship between the city, its waterways, and the land available to hold excess water.

Storms expose known weaknesses

After a storm that brought more than nine inches of rain between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, New Orleans experienced its highest one-hour rainfall totals in the Weather Bureau’s fifty-five years of records there: nearly three inches. Depending on where it was measured, the twenty-four-hour rainfall was the heaviest or second heaviest on record. The drainage system discharged more than six billion gallons into Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, a historic effort that nonetheless failed to keep pace with the storm. Flood-affected residents demanded investigations into officials and workers responsible for the system.

Mayor Arthur O’Keefe criticized the Board for failing to keep drains and catch basins clear of debris. Board officials countered that the city had not kept streets clean, that residents had thrown trash into them, and that lightning had struck power lines supplying some of the pumps. The dispute exposed how maintenance and operation depended on more than the Board alone, even as the public looked to the institution responsible for drainage when streets flooded.

Earl had been warning for a decade that the system could not handle that much rain. He maintained that flooding in the city’s lower areas was inevitable without funds for a planned expansion. He identified the neighborhood around Napoleon Avenue near Southern Baptist Hospital as a recurring example of the problem. The 1926 storm did not prompt the investment he sought: by the end of the year, taxpayers had not approved even the less ambitious improvements, no bond had been issued, and the Board’s construction spending was nearly unchanged from 1925.

The following spring brought another record storm. In less than twenty-four hours, 14.01 inches of rain fell, and the pumping stations again struggled. Around midnight, lightning brought down a 13,000-volt NOPSI line where it crossed the Board’s main feeder wires. The resulting short circuit damaged the drainage plant’s switching system and a submarine electrical cable, and burned out one of the two 6,000-kilowatt generators serving the city’s drainage and sewage systems and high-lift water pumps. Repairs restored the wires quickly, but replacing the generator coils would take weeks. The system was left with patched power and only half its normal supply as it faced the most intense rainfall then recorded in New Orleans.

Proposals, funding, and flood control

Earl laid out improvements at different scales. With about half a million dollars, the Board could improve pumping; three million dollars could widen canals. He proposed carrying out the work in the order likely to benefit the greatest number of people and framed the decision as a question of how much the public wished to invest. His aim was to make the city better able to handle moderate storms, not to promise that every deluge could be prevented. He considered the cost of building for the worst storms physically and financially impracticable; another expert estimated that matching the storm’s intensity would require eight times the pumping equipment and eight times the outflow-canal capacity.

Financing required political choices beyond the Board’s engineering plans. Bonds for drainage improvements would require a higher city debt ceiling, and changing that ceiling involved both additional taxes and state-legislative approval. After the 1927 flooding, Earl called for increasing the limit from 4 percent to 5 percent of assessed value, as well as raising and strengthening levees. Calls for emergency bonds also came from residents in the hard-hit Lakeview District. The city’s demands for improvements therefore collided with reluctance to approve their costs, even after repeated floods had made the risks visible.

Expansion and persistent vulnerability

Over the decades after the 1927 storm, the Board obtained funds to improve drainage. One of its engineers designed what was described as the world’s largest pump, and fourteen were custom-made for New Orleans. By the end of the twentieth century, drainage capacity had nearly quadrupled, reaching more than 45,000 cubic feet per second. This was a substantial expansion of the city’s ability to move water, but it did not erase local flooding.

The area around Baptist Hospital in the Freret neighborhood remained among the city’s most flood-prone locations. In the early twenty-first century, even a moderate storm could leave enough water around Memorial Medical Center that employees parked their cars on the raised neutral ground a block away. Maintenance workers used a battered metal fishing boat, stored suspended from the ceiling of the parking-garage basement, to bring colleagues to work. Meanwhile, equipment, supplies, food, records, and linens were again kept in the basement. The Board’s history of increased capacity stood alongside these routines of local adaptation: infrastructure had grown, yet people at the hospital had become accustomed to water as a recurring condition rather than a threat that the drainage system had eliminated.