Boil Advisory
Two words that no New Orleanian wants to hear but every New Orleanian has heard more times than they can count. Boil advisory. It means do not drink the water from your tap. Do not brush your teeth with it. Do not give it to your pets. Boil it first, for a full minute at a rolling boil, or better yet, just buy bottled water and wait for the Sewerage and Water Board to figure out whatever has gone wrong this time. An animal in the pumping station. A mylar balloon on a power line. A pressure drop nobody can explain. The reasons change. The result is always the same: boil your water and wonder how a major American city in the twenty-first century cannot reliably deliver clean water to its residents.
The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans — the S&WB, pronounced as individual letters by locals the way you might spell out a curse word in front of children — is the governmental agency responsible for the city's water, sewerage, and drainage systems. It is, by virtually every metric available, one of the most troubled public utilities in the United States. It barely functions. And it will still overcharge you four hundred dollars a month.
The Billing Situation
If the boil advisories are the headline, the billing is the fine print that makes you throw the newspaper across the room. The S&WB's billing system has been a source of confusion, outrage, and dark comedy for years. Bills arrive late, or not at all, or for amounts that bear no relationship to actual water usage. Residents have received bills for thousands of dollars on months when they were out of town. Others have received no bill for six months and then gotten a lump sum that would make a mortgage payment blush.
The meters are part of the problem. Many of them are old, broken, or misread. The billing software has been overhauled multiple times, and each overhaul seems to create new problems without solving the old ones. Calling the S&WB to dispute a bill is an exercise in patience that makes a visit to City Hall look like a trip to the spa. Hold times measured in hours. Explanations that explain nothing. The distinct feeling that you are arguing with a system that does not understand itself.
The Infrastructure
Beneath the billing chaos lies a more fundamental problem: the physical infrastructure is ancient and failing. The drainage pumps that keep the city from flooding during heavy rain are over a century old in some cases. The water mains break with regularity, sending geysers of brown water shooting into the air and shutting down streets for days. The sewer lines leak. The treatment plants strain. The entire system was designed for a different era and has been held together with patches, prayers, and insufficient funding for decades.
When it rains hard — and in New Orleans, it always eventually rains hard — the pumps are the only thing between dry streets and catastrophic flooding. The S&WB operates the largest drainage pump system in the world, a distinction that sounds impressive until you realize it means your city requires the largest drainage pump system in the world just to exist. When those pumps work, the system is an engineering marvel. When they do not, which happens more often than anyone is comfortable admitting, the streets flood and the city holds its breath.
Barely Functioning, Fully Charging
The S&WB is the pest that every New Orleanian has a story about. The unexplained bill. The boil advisory on Christmas Eve. The water main break that turned their street into a river. It is an agency that manages to be simultaneously essential and infuriating, the entity that keeps the city habitable while also making that habitability as frustrating as possible. You cannot live in New Orleans without the S&WB, and you cannot live in New Orleans without cursing the S&WB. It is the circle of life, New Orleans edition. Now boil your water.
Leave a comment
All comments are moderated before being published.
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.