Owen Courreges: Welcome to New Orleans — just don’t drink the water

Owen Courrèges

There was a time that I got a mild chuckle out of reading the old bumper sticker – New Orleans: Third World and Proud of It. The idea, of course, is that New Orleans is a poor city with inefficient, corrupt government, hence more akin to a developing nation than a prominent American city. Self-deprecating humor and all that.

However, it’s started to hit a bit too close to home lately. Last week we endured yet another “boil water” advisory for the east bank of Orleans Parish in the wake of a brief, 20-minute failure of the plant’s power generation capacity. It was the tenth such advisory in just five years.

Now, having potable water on tap (you know, the type that won’t cause painful bowel movements upon ingestion) is important to any advanced civilization. When that becomes inconsistent, when boiling your water for a couple of days every six months is “normal,” it makes one begin to question exactly whether this city can legitimately be called “first world.” Montezuma’s Revenge shouldn’t be experienced in the continental United States.

Now with aging infrastructure, it’s inevitable that problems will occur. The 112-year-old Carrollton water plant was undoubtedly well-constructed, but even the best infrastructure has a shelf-life. The Sewerage and Water Board blames Katrina damage for its inability to control outages, yet there is no excuse for complete electrical failures to occur with this frequency a decade later. Jefferson Parish has also had boil water advisories, but they have them roughly a quarter as often.

The S&WB also insists that the problem is being dealt with. Equipment is being revamped, water towers will be installed, and the organization criticized as rife with fraud and waste is supposedly reemerging as a paragon of good government. Apparently we just have to suck it up and deal with the problem in the meantime.

“I can’t warranty [sic] that nothing will ever happen ever again,” S&WB Executive Director Cedric Grant told the Times-Picayune. “But our goal is to make ourselves as self-sufficient and self-reliant as we can.”

This is not altogether comforting given the massive water and sewerage rate increases that the city enacted to pay for a dramatic overhaul of the S&WB’s equipment and lines. I think I voice the opinion of most New Orleanians when I say that we expected them to tackle this issue first. If providing water you can drink isn’t the top priority, one wonders what exactly took its place.

Time will tell if the S&WB is truly fixing the problem or is just dithering around and wasting funds — its usual M.O. We can only hope it’s the former, though experience tells us to prepare for the latter.

Owen Courrèges, a New Orleans attorney and resident of the Garden District, offers his opinions for UptownMessenger.com on Mondays. He has previously written for the Reason Public Policy Foundation.