Last week's flood event may not have been as bad in New Orleans if someone had not tried to steal copper cabling that sent electricity to pumps.
That's according to the head of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board.
Ghassan Korban told WWL's Tommy Tucker, "The biggest issue we had, unfortunately, was caused by a vandalism at one of our electric meters... junction box."
He explained that someone trying to steal the wiring, compromised the electrical delivery system to a pumping station.
"Somebody had previuosly attempted to cut through...
the cable for the value of copper," Korban said. "It would have been like a hundred or two hundred dollars to them, but the ramification was so much greater."
The Executive Director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans says that while the thief wasn't able to actually take the cable, the damage done was impactful.
"We lost the ability, the conduit to deliver power to key pumps was impeded and curtailed."
He says that on top of so many other challenges, this was just another problem to deal with.
"You're constantly battling the old system, all the moving parts, all the fragility of it, then you add vandelism to the mix," Korban lemented.
The damaged cable the theif attempted to steal was only providing enough power to run about 83% of the pumps at one station.
"The cable was delivering power to one of our largest pumping stations," according to Korban. "We still were able to run ten pumps... out of 12."
He stressed, however, that the intense rainfall would have flooded the streets anyway... this just reduced the S&WB's ability to drain the rain more quickly, and it may have made the flooding deeper.
