July 22, 2006 New Orleans, Getting Less Power, May Pay More By ADAM NOSSITER NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/us/22blackout.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print NEW ORLEANS, July 21 To the list of daily aggravations in the new New Orleans, add one that augments the heat, spoils the food and drains the cash register: power failures. The wind blows and a neighborhoods power goes out. Or it rains and the power goes out somewhere else. Thunder crashes distantly and out goes the power. Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, the city still does not have a reliable electrical system. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of repairs are still needed on a system devastated by flooding, the local utility is in bankruptcy and less than half the systems prestorm customers have returned. Of those who have, many have endured hot and sleepless nights with no air-conditioning. How do you expect the city to recover when you dont have a reliable source of electrical power? asked Robert Harmon, an engineering consultant in the Bywater neighborhood. So much for the injury; now comes the insult. Entergy New Orleans, the power company here, wants to increase its rates 25 percent to help pay for part of what it says is $718 million in storm losses and revenue shortfalls. That would increase the average household bill by $45 a month. Higher rates is a very serious issue, said Mark Drennen, president of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic development agency. We are struggling to recover. This is one more obstacle to economic recovery. The combination of bigger bills and spotty service is not a promising formula, many residents agree, for a city in which rents are now high, where finding groceries can be an adventure and where moving companies are reporting a small boom outbound. Last year, the Bush administration rejected a taxpayer bailout of Entergy, and now the utility is hoping the state will give it a sprinkling of the $10 billion in federal housing aid planned for New Orleans. The state has not agreed to that request, however, and if assistance does not come, customers may be forced to foot the bill. For several months after Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans was dark; by the end of 2005 most of the city was lit again. But a tiny section of the Lower Ninth Ward, near the levee breach, remains unserved an indication of the systems continuing fragility. Because of unrepaired damage from the storm, a power company spokeswoman said, the utility does not have the same ability to track power failures how many there have been and who has been affected as it did before. In a city where so many are poor, utility issues like the dreaded monthly power bill have long been a political flashpoint. Air-conditioning is needed six months out of the year, bills run into the hundreds of dollars even in modest houses, and political reputations have been made by taking on the power company. Before the storm, one of the citys few public advocacy groups, and an effective one at that, was organized around battling Entergy and its predecessor, New Orleans Public Service. But high bills or no, at least the power used to stay on. Aggravating? Yes, of course, in the middle of the summertime, you know good and well its aggravating, said Joe Shaheen, who lives in Bywater, which has been hit particularly hard by blackouts recently. His windows are sealed shut; burglars and other criminals are a problem on these blocks. If you see people sitting out on their steps, the power is out, residents here say. In Bywater, they call it returning to the dark ages. Not all areas of the city are similarly afflicted. But in Bywater, an old collection of pastel shotgun houses and cottages by the river that was not flooded by the hurricane, the people are weary of it. When does it go out? Every time the wind blows wrong, said Ricky Stephens, a contractor on Piety Street, disgusted. Its just amazing. With temperatures staying in the 80s after dark, the nights can be long. I had to go somewhere else to sleep, said Nicole Guinchard, a waitress who works a 60-hour week on two jobs. It was a hotbox in here, she said outside her house on Dauphine Street. The deal was, at first, it was every time it rained. Lately, its been for no reason at all, said Linda Morreale, an owner of a neighborhood tavern, Bud Rips. Ms. Morreale has seen her customers slowly drift away: Everybody sits around until they get kind of uncomfortable. There is sudden darkness, then the creeping invasion of the humidity outside. Mr. Stephens, the contractor, detailed the stages: You get hot. Your kids get irritable. They drive you crazy. Its a whole big ordeal. Not to mention, he said, the extra $400 he has had to spend to replace groceries lost to the failures. Every couple of days, the lights be going off, said Samuel Breaux, a warehouseman in a neighborhood sewing factory. The big building goes dark, and the women stop sewing. You cant do too much of nothing when the powers out. Entergy executives say the problem is a complicated mix of uncertainty over how many people to serve, power lines that remain down, and connections that are no longer as reliable. Before the storm, when the electricity blinked out for a moment as it did even in normal times, during New Orleanss frequent summer storms the utility could immediately switch to alternate lines. That option is far less available now. We dont have the same number of power lines, said Rod West, an Entergy manager. Most of the 22 substations were flooded; Entergy estimates it will need $267 million just to fix the remaining damage. For now, knowledgeable outsiders sound more disturbed than the Entergy executives do. A lot of the system is really jury-rigged right now, said Clint Vince, a Washington lawyer who has long served as consultant on energy to the New Orleans City Council. So it doesnt have anywhere near the reliability it had pre-Katrina. A lot of the distribution facilities are damaged. Weve looked at their system pretty carefully and we are very alarmed by the state of it. Entergy is struggling along, for now, on a $200 million line of credit provided by its parent company, Entergy Inc. Local politicians are promising to scrutinize the requested rate increase carefully. And Bywater is enduring this newest challenge, mostly with resignation. Were blessed, compared to the people in St. Bernard, said James L. Spence Sr., another resident, referring to the parish just east of New Orleans, which has not begun to recover. Still, people can only sit in the heat for so long, said Ms. Morreale, quickly shifting to bigger difficulties her new life in a trailer in Arabi across the parish line, for instance. My whole life right now is unfair, she said. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
