Recently, it seemed every news outlet led with some variation on the headline, “SWB worker fails to turn on pumps for 45 minutes and the city floods.”
Headlines like this make everyone dumber and make a solution further away.
was caused by 5 inches of rain. A 45-minute delay in starting two pump stations exacerbated the problem, but make no mistake — we were going to be flooding anyway.
That is because we have allowed people to overpave their lots, and code enforcement has failed to correct them. We’ve allowed businesses to cover every inch of land in concrete, never developed stormwater management flood basins and learned nothing in 20 years about urban stormwater management. We’ve tolerated idiotic headlines like this when we need to be reading the Urban Water Plan.
You can read this moronic clickbait and remain a victim of poor management of the Sewerage & Water Board, or you can go to , learn about the Urban Water Plan and demand accountability from your government, your neighbors and yourself. You can do something that will actually work to stop flooding in your community when it rains hard. Blaming the utility will not fix this.
CLARK THOMPSON
New Orleans